The presenter of this webcast series is Microsoft's Ron Cundiff. Before joining Microsoft in 2002, Ron designed and implemented a global online commodities exchange system for an ISV. He has also held management and technical leadership positions with a Microsoft partner. His certifications include MCSD, MCSE, MCDBA, MCP+I+SB - and he's working on extending the list.
Need a Quick Way to See These .NET Videos and Monitor Your Progress?
May I Also Recommend for Further Study? Bob Tabor also has over 80 videos on Visual Basic.net. Check them out in the video library section of LearnVisualStudio.
1. Introduction - video missing
Key Concepts:
A. the basic language constructs
B. Different types of applications you can build using Visual Basic .NET
C. Overview of webcast series
2/5/2007
2. Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition- video missing
Key Concepts:
A. Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition, a free download from Microsoft that enables you to develop Visual Basic .NET applications.
B. Integrated development environment (IDE) features, like Code Editor, Compiler, IntelliSense, and the Debugger.
C. The project system that can help you build a collection to keep all the files related to your program together.
2/13/2007
3. Class Libraries -video missing
Key Concepts:
A. How Visual Basic .NET relies on a hierarchical set of prewritten functions that enable developers to gain access to standard functionality provided by the host operating system.
B. How these functions are contained in files called class libraries
2/19/2007
4. VB.NET Program Structure - video missing
Key Concepts:
A. What Visual Basic.NET is and how programs written in Visual Basic are structured.
B. Basics of the language and how Visual Basic assembles the lines of code
2/20/2007
5. Language Fundamentals - video missing
Key Concepts:
A. Object types
B. Variables
C. Constants
D. Statements
3/5/2007
6. Classes and Objects - video missing
Key Concepts:
A. Classes
B. Objects
3/19/2007
7. Operator Basics - video missing
Key Concepts:
A. Different kinds of operators and how to use them.
3/26/2007
8. Branching and Looping - video missing
Key Concepts:
A. Iterators
B. Loops
C. Branching
4/2/2007
9. Basic Debugging - video missing
Key Concepts:
A. Debugging
B. How the integrated development environment (IDE) enables you to see what is going on inside your application while it is running
C. Tracing
4/9/2007
10. Arrays and Collections - video missing
Key Concepts:
A. Arrays
B. Collections
4/16/2007
11. Exception Handling - video missing
Key Concepts:
A. Exception-handling
B. Try/catch blocks
4/23/2007
12. Delegates and Events - video missing
Key Concepts:
A. Delegates and events, and how they can send alerts to other applications when interesting changes occur within your application.
B. How multiple listeners can respond to a single event.
4/30/2007
13. Inheritance and Polymorphism - video missing
Key Concepts:
A. Inheritance allows one to create objects that are "like" other objects.
B. Inheritance and polymorphism can reduce the amount of code you write and make it easier to understand.
A. We discuss how to include data access features in your applications. We specifically address how to integrate Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database functionality directly into your Web and Windows-based applications. See how Microsoft Visual Basic enables you to programmatically get direct access to SQL Server data. We also look at the various features in Visual Basic that empower you to develop against SQL Server 2005 and other data sources.
A. We discuss the various deployment options for your applications. Writing an application can be a very tedious task, but deploying it can be an even greater challenge. Join this webcast to see how the different deployment techniques work, and to gain the information you need to successfully deploy your own applications.
A. Join this final session to see how you can build a multi-tier business application with Visual Basic. Do not miss this chance to learn how building business applications with a multi-tier architecture can enable you to build an application for maintainability, reusability, and extensibility.
In this tutorial, we learn how to add speech to a visual basic application. You can download the VB source code for this project by clicking on this link: Text-To-Speech
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Once you have downloaded the source code, you need to open Visual Basic Express 2005 and clicking on File/Open Project. Then, navigate to where you downloaded the source and click on the file that has the .sln (solution) extension.
Three steps are important in using speech in a VB application:
1. Add a reference to Microsoft Speech Object by going to Project/Add Reference/Com tab
2. Add the Imports SpeechLib statement at the top of the module that will be using the speech.
3. Create a new SpVoice object and call Voice() to read the text.
If you have any problems locating the Microsoft Speech object, you may need to download Microsoft Speech SDK 5.1
If you desire to learn the details, I highly recommend the series from Learn Visual Studio. It is one of the best sites for learning Visual Studio that I have found, and they allow you to download many videos for free to try it out. I have a Lifetime Subscription to Learn Visual Studio and have spent hundreds of hours watching their videos. I am very satisfied with the amount of information that they provide, and I think it is an extremely good value. Most video tutorials and live training classes for Visual Studio cost around $25 per hour (see AppDev.com, Learnkey.com, etc.), but Learn Visual Studio only costs about 70 cents per hour of video. You can save 30% off of the retail price for Learn Visual Studio by clicking on the link at the beginning of this paragraph.
By far, the best hosting company that I have found for .NET applications is Discountasp.net. Discountasp.net provides many SQL tools that make it easy to remotely manage your sql database directly from your computer that other hosting companies like GoDaddy do not.
You can find a summary of over 700 video tutorials on a wide variety of programming topics at this post.
Summary:If you have tried all the SEO tactics and only received mediocre rankings, it is time for you to shift your attention from web promotion to producing quality research and content. This study shows that seasoned Authority Sites rank in top 5% of Alexa.
What is An Authority Site?
Dictionary.com defines "Authority" as follows:
Authority: Au-thor-i-ty [uh-thawr-i-tee] - noun:
1. An accepted source of expert information or advice: a noted authority on birds; a reference book often cited as an authority.
2. Power to influence or persuade resulting from knowledge or experience: political observers who acquire authority with age.
In internet terminology, an Authority Site is one that has a large empire of high-ranking pages linking back to it. Well-known examples include About.com, Wikipedia.org, and so on. These are sites that others look to (and link to) as experts in the field.
In this study, "Authority Site" simply refers to any site that has been promoted with Authority Site Tools available from Jack Humphrey.
Preliminary Study of 56 Randomly Selected Authority Sites
This study started by randomly selecting 56 sites that are being promoted with Authority Site tools. On average, these sites ranked better than 87% of all other sites monitored by Alexa (see chart).
A Look at Seasoned Authority Sites
One problem with the preliminary study is that Alexa uses three months of data to calculate its rankings. However, many of the sites listed in the random sample were only a few weeks or months old. So even though weekly Alexa statistics indicated that these sites were ranking extremely high, the three month Alexa ranking was lower. To adjust for this problem, the original list of 56 sites was examined to see how many months of archived blogs existed for each site. Then, only sites that contained over 4 months of blog archives were analyzed. The chart below shows that these authority sites ranked in the top 5% on Alexa.
Note: If you are not familiar with Alexa, please visit www.alexa.com and go to the traffic rankings section. Enter the url for any web site, and it will show where that site ranks within the 11.2 million sites that Alexa tracks. It will also provide a graph that shows a historical picture of traffic to that web site. Please use Alexa to verify the results of this study for yourself by looking up the traffic rankings for any sites that interest you or for any of the 56 randomly selected Authority sites listed below.
I would have thought that the subject of Doorway Pages (Entry Pages, Gateway Pages, etc.) had been exhaustively explored by now, but we tend to forget that there are new users coming on the internet daily, and there hasn't been much coverage on the topic recently.��
There are many design and development tools (free or otherwise) available for the new webmaster, so almost anyone can build a website, but they face the same age-old problem of trying to find ways to get their new site noticed (and the longer it takes, the more frantic they get).
We all go through the same learning curve. We read or hear about various promotion techniques. We get advice on Search Engine Optimization, Opt-in Lists, Safe Lists, E-zine advertising, and the list goes on. There is a wealth of information on the web, but there is probably just as much, or more, misinformation. Not only can the important information change rapidly, but it is awfully easy to stumble across archived information, or a free eBook - and not realize that it is outdated.
Anyway, a reader recently asked me about the usefulness of Doorway Pages to increase their rankings in the search engines. It will soon become obvious what my short answer would have been, but I don't normally just accept someone else's opinion without an explanation. I hope you are the same way.
Doorway pages were first developed as a means to create a page that was optimized for a particular search engine in order to achieve a higher ranking. Because search engines used different algorithms for ranking web sites, it had become impossible to optimize a single page to meet the ranking criteria of all of them. You could get a page ranked high on one search engine and watch your rankings plummet on another.
The answer?
Create multiple (Doorway) pages - each optimized for a single, major search engine, and have each of them link, redirect, or forward to the actual web page you wanted to promote, and then submit that page to that particular search engine - instead of the actual web page your viewer will ultimately see. While it was a little extra work to create 6,7, or even a dozen or more Doorway pages - the general consensus was that the ranking results in the targeted search engines made it all worthwhile.
The problem with this…
As with every good technique, tip, or trick - some overzealous (and that's being kind) "marketers" (and that's being liberal) will find a way to abuse it. Just as some people will put popular search terms in their keywords Meta Tag regardless of whether those terms have any relevance to the web page being submitted, they also began spamming the search engines with Doorway pages.��
Now, understand that the search engines gain their competitive edge by being able to deliver more relevant results to any set of search terms. It is their business purpose, their entire reason for existing. The better they are at doing this, the more popular their service becomes over their competition, and the more successful they will be. They will combat anyone or anything that interferes with their ability to deliver their product or service (wouldn't you?).��
Doorway pages are viewed by the search engines as an attempt to manipulate them and their service. How can they possibly differentiate their service from the competition if they allow their "supplier" (web masters) to dictate what they will deliver to their "customer" (web surfers)?
It didn't take long for the major search engines to learn to identify Doorway pages, and their overwhelming response has been to:
downgrade the results attained through the use of those pages,
refuse to list those pages, or
ban the site from listing on their service altogether
I could have written this article just based on the regular reading I do, but then I would have just been passing on someone else's opinion. In order to respond to my reader with absolute confidence, I first researched over 3 years of articles from a myriad of sources. From those it was easy to see the trend build, and then come into disfavor. Finally, I went to the search engines themselves to read their current policies and guidelines. Some mention Doorway pages specifically, but even those that require a little interpretation are pretty easy to understand.��
The major search engines disapprove of methods that present different content to their spiders than the content that is ultimately presented to the viewer. For your own edification, here are just a few of the listings I found, with snippets from their guidelines:
From Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users, or present different content to search engines than you display to users.
Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
From AltaVista:
http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/new#rls
Pages that duplicate content, either by excessive submission of the same page, submitting the same pages from multiple domains, or submitting the same content from multiple hosts
Pages that are machine-generated with minimal or no content, whose sole purpose is to get a user to click to another page
Pages that contain only links to other pages
From AllTheWeb: http://www.alltheweb.com/info/about/spam_policy.html
exclude Page Spam documents from our index or at least disregard links from it when computing static rank
The Alternative:
If your keyword phrases are relevant to your site content, then it follows that the content will naturally include those relevant keyword phrases. If not, then you need to either rethink that content and its presentation - or rethink your choice of keyword phrases. It's really that simple. Each page of your site can and should have its own topic and its own set of relevant keyword phrases. Make sure that every page of your site contains a Title, a Meta description, and Meta keywords (again those keyword phrases that are relevant to that page).
Then when you submit your "home" page to a search engine, it can spider your entire site through your linked pages, picking up all that Meta information so that each page gets listed properly. In a sense, every page on your site becomes sort of a "Doorway" to the rest of the site. Concentrate on building content, and give the engines just what they want to see anyway: relevant content.��
When submitting your web site to directories, submit each page you want listed (with the relevant search terms for that page).���
Then of course, it is a matter of sitting back and waiting unless you opt for one of the "express" listing services or "pay-per-click" placement - but those are separate topics, deserving of their own articles. With straight submission, it will take some time for your site to even get listed, but once you're there you can get very targeted traffic for a very long time to come.
Copyright � 2003 Sid Hale
About the Author
Sid Hale is the founder of the ad-CLiX Traffic Exchange, publisher of the ad-CLiX Newsletter, author of the Insider's Guide to Affiliate Showcase, and co-founder of Headlines2Go - a brand new Headline Testing Service for serious marketers. In another life, Sid is an Information Technology Consultant, serving small, medium and large corporations. ��
Web promotion can be considered as a continuing process for promoting a website to bring more visitors. Techniques such as search engine optimization (SEO) web content development and search engine submission are used to increase traffic to any website. Basic web promotion starts with the optimization of the web pages, building of in-bound links or writing an article or press release. Once it is done you can promote your website at little or no cost. Pay-per click advertising, email marketing and viral marketing are some of the more advanced strategies of promoting a website.
Free web promotion techniques:
Focus on search engine optimization: it is the best thing in terms of free web promotion. SEO is the process of making web pages attractive to the search engines. You can certainly improve web page rankings and attract more traffic to your Web site.
Ask people to link to you: you can get free promotion of your site if people put a link to your site on their site. You can get better search rankings but you need to be careful about the quality of links. You need to focus your reciprocal linking efforts on quality and relevant links. The standard procedure of doing this is to look for relevant sites and an email to the webmasters requesting a link on their site.
Write articles and press releases: the best thing about this free Web site promotion strategy is that again some third person will be promoting the site for you. If you get your articles published on popular sites or well-known magazines, then your Web site can be promoted for a long time without any efforts from your part. You need to be able to write well on a particular topic that others may want to read or publish. Find the quality magazine or site for getting your articles published. Once you find it, send an email asking if they want to use a particular piece. Make sure that your email mentions the free publication of articles.
Besides online site promotion, you can also perform offline web promotion to bring in traffic. Use a URL that people can remember and a domain name that defines what you do and offer. Word of mouth has always been an effective web promotion method and by increasing awareness of your site to the outside world, you can increase the traffic on the Internet as well.
Zakir Hussain is a Search Engine Optimizer at Telegenisys India Pvt. Ltd., a company that offers a wide variety of Search engine optimization, Telemarketing Services, Internet Marketing and website marketing services. Visit at
Mega Interactive
