March 2006 Entries
My newest article has been published on MSDN Coding 4 Fun. Many hobbyist developers may not know much about databases or how to work with the free SQL Server Express engine that it included with Visual Studio Express. In this article I discuss how to create a database, create a DataSet to access it, then how to integrate that DataSet with your application. Pretty neat stuff!
Check out the article at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/inthebox/dataenabled/default.aspx
UPDATE (6/26/2007): It has come to my attention that this article is no longer hosted since the Coding 4 Fun was redone. I've zip'd up the code and article and...
I received some questions from Gary M. about my Tricking out your applications article. I figured it might be helpful to someone else so I'm posting it here for everyone's benefit. I expect there will be questions sometimes, but if I'm ever just way off on my level, I hope that someone will let me know!
Heres the code section in question:
public TrickForm(){ InitializeComponent(); backgroundComboBox.Items.Add( new TaggedString("RoundedAAA", Properties.Resources.RoundedFrame)); backgroundComboBox.Items.Add( new TaggedString("Star", Properties.Resources.StarFrame)); backgroundComboBox.Items.Add( new TaggedString("Gear", Properties.Resources.GearFrame));}private void backgroundComboBox_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e){ TaggedString val = (TaggedString)backgroundComboBox.SelectedItem; Bitmap bmp = (Bitmap)val.Tag; SetFormBackgroundImage(bmp);}
What is TaggedString? I can't find a definition for it anywhere.
This is something...
Google has announced that they have purchased Writely. Great move. I can actually take credit for sending that as a suggestion to Google a few months ago. Maybe they didn’t directly act on my suggestion, but the synergy was immediately apparent to me. Here you’ve got a company that hopes to put all the information in the world online. Recent leaks from them make it clear that they plan online storage in the near future. This works nicely. What’s the point of just storing your data if you need to download it to work with it?
I've been reading about gaming changes in Windows Vista, and I must say it's a good start. Game ratings have been around for too many years to have no OS integration yet. If you haven't heard yet, Vista will allow you to restrict user accounts for movie ratings (DVD), music ratings (CD), and game ratings. The game ratings can use ESRB or other ratings services along with administrator-set preferences to allow or disallow the game to run. As parents of young kids will know, this is pretty handy! Especially I hope that this works with my system where all children's...