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Windows Imaging Component (WIC in short) is the new platform to load, save and convert images between various image formats, including the latest HD Photo format designed and aggressively pushed by Microsoft, to be the JPEG2000 replacement. Unlike JPEG2000 which is plagued by various patents issues, HD Photo standard is a open standard which is free for all to use. HD Photo has a compression rate and picture qualities better than JPEG and JPEG2000. Windows Imaging Component is also a platform for programmers to write their own image codecs for their own image format or RAW images from digital cameras. The standard codecs, which are provided in the Windows Imaging Component, are more secure than those provided by GDI+. WIC only provides ways to load and convert and save images; To display an image loaded by WIC, you either use Device Independent Bitmaps(DIB) or GDI+. The sample code provided by Microsoft uses DIBs which are difficult to use. For this article, we will use GDI+. The advantages of using GDI+ is that you can do drawing or further image processing on the GDI+ image.

Adding custom configuration sections lets you leverage built-in .NET configuration mechanism to employ strong-type objects to access the configuration content without taking care of manipulation of XML^{1, 2}. This article introduces a tip about how to add your custom configuration sections in “another” web.config while not losing the support as in the web.config located at the root of Web applications.

Yazeed Hamdan has created a base class which encapsulates the most common logic for DB operations in the PROCESSES/OPERATIONS Layer instead of repeating the same code over and over for each class.

Adnan Aman shows some tricks and tips to improve the performance of web applications.

 Highrise and other new Ajax enabled tools have this feature that when you type in a search query, it automatically updates the search results below. It's almost like a Auto-Complete Box, but with full results on the page instead of a drop down list below the control. Unfortunately I didn't find anything like this in the Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax Toolkit.

The Windows Mobile 6.1 Emulator Images package adds emulator images to Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2008 that let you test applications for Windows Mobile 6.1.

Nowadays error logging becomes mandatory and there has been lots of techniques/API's to log the errors. We develop a ASP.NET application and it works fine on your development machine, and when we deploy the application to the production we set the <compilation debug="false" ...> element in your web.config , of course it is the best practice, which makes the error not visible to the end users.
Well, now, we got some exception and we wonder what is that error and you don't have any clue about error since we have not logged the exception and we were left at no man’s land and makes the developer job very tough without any clue about the error and hence we expect is to log the error and a notification mail to sent to the development so that we make the developer job much easier which is even best practice.

In following article we are going to cover the topics on how to log the error in a simple way and of course in a efficient manner.

Almost all of the Silverlight demos you see out there are completely client-side, and invoke Web services to post/get data. This approach makes sense, but when you want to use Silverlight to functionally enhance your existing website, you may want to have some kind of integration between Silverlight objects and your server-side controls.