This is a presentation I gave to the Northern Colorado .NET SIG meeting on 8 October, 2007.

The .NET Framework 2.0 defines more than 160 namespaces. This talk explores four of the most interesting, useful, and underused of those namespaces. Covering any one of these tools in depth would take hours so this is just an overview. It only provides an introduction and starting point so you can add these powerful tools to your applications. This talk covers:

• Regular Expressions - I'll show how to use regular expressions to see if a string matches a pattern (for example, whether it has a phone number or email address format), find multiple matches within a string, and make complex string replacements.
• Cryptography - I'll show how to encrypt and decrypt files, and how to calculate a file's hash value to see if it has been hacked by evildoers.
• Reflection - I'll show how to use reflection to learn about .NET objects and assemblies. I'll show hot to enumerate an object's properties, and how to find and retrieve resources in an assembly.
• Direct3D - I'll explain how to get started with Direct3D and I'll show how to build a simple Direct3D that displays rotating 3-dimensional objects. (This topic is a bit different from the others because it's not included in the .NET Framework. You need to download and install the DirectX SDK to build Direct3D applications but the result is worth the effort!)

Click here to download the presentation and example programs (2.84MB).