January 2006 Entries
Yesterday was a great day, with my sister giving birth to her third child (second daughter), Felicity! We've had her other two to help out and they can't wait to get back home with new sister. Everyone is healthy and everything went smoothly.
Check out the gallery of pictures!
I spent way too many hours exporting some projects in Visual Studio over the past few days. By default, in the File menu, you click Export Template to start the process of exporting your current project, or an item in the project, as a redistributable template. As it turns out, in Visual Studio Team System, this menu option isn't there. I thought maybe it hadn't made it in the final RTM build, but then after doing some Googling I found the obvious solution -- customize the menus! Here are the easy-to-follow steps that I should have thought of on my...
My latest article is online. I expanded on an earlier article that set the desktop wallpaper, and now it demonstrates how to work with settings, scan a file folder, work with the random number generator, and do simple imaging functions (determine size, change image format). It's a pretty nice start, and can be extended pretty easily to be even better. Check it out at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/inthebox/wallpaper2/default.aspx
UPDATED:
Newer post here
In the past few days I've gotten over 100 comments with the same text:
“Solemn article. It make me lost in thoughts.”
I did a Google search and about ten other blogs show up with the same comment/person. No idea what this is about, but they will be removed tonight! I really just don't understand comment spammers. Of all the stupid, pointless things to do. Sheesh.
I'm sure that my thousands and thousands of daily readers (*) missed me sorely the past few days, but I'm back online again. I switched hosting providers and it was not fun getting back on. I assumed it would be a no-downtime switch from one provider to another, but I was told (after the fact) that there is always a 24-48 hour downtime period when switching. This makes no sense to me at all, so assume it's their fault. To make things worse, they also didn't tell me that I had explicitly click one radio button to actually switch the...
My newest article has been posted on MSDN. It's about making your Windows forms look better using techniques not directly available through the Visual Studio properties and wizards. Ever wondered how to make your application start without the main form appearing? How about making an application single-instance? Adding a system tray notification icon? What about those funky-shaped forms (like in music player apps)?
All of this is covered in the new article. Check it out at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/inthebox/trickedoutapp/default.aspx
I do a lot of development on VMWare and Virtual PC. I don't even have Visual Studio installed on my primary machines. When I write code that I want to run on my primary machine (like my time tracker), everything is usually fine, but sometimes I want to debug it. Restarting the app on the virtual machine may not reproduce a given problem. I've noticed before that the Debug | Attach to Process menu command seems to allow you to connect to proceses on other machines. I never realized what that entailed though.
It turns out that (unless you are on...
Lately, I've been trying to work more with databinding in my projects. I'm accustomed to thinking of it as a means of associating user interface controls with a database, but in fact it's much more than that! The fact is, you can databind to a variety of types of data, without any need for DataSets. The coolest thing I've come across recently has been databinding to application settings. Settings are new to Visual Studio 2005 and allow you to define user and application settings that are managed by the application framework. You name a property like “AvatarFilename,” set it a...