Rick Strahl's Web Log

Weblog Posts in January 2004

Reducing WinForm Memory Footprint with SetWorkingSet
January 27, 2004 @ 7:55 pm

Windows Forms memory foot print tends to be very large. Part of the problem is that the JIT runs inside of your application and all sorts of code gets fired and compiled when your app first starts. I’ve been sucked into this debate regarding Windows forms being pigs in terms of memory usage recently and in light of this I thought I’d share one way I’ve been using to reduce the memory footprint of .Net applications by using SetWorkingSet.

23 comments

Snowbound!
January 27, 2004 @ 10:17 am

Time to get out the snowboard and head to the cold weather. I'm leaving tonight for Utah for a week of powder with my friend Morgan. Looks like the weather is setting up perfect with one storm after another lined up cruising across the Pacific and it's been snowing every day for the last few days as well. It's been two years since I've been in the snow and I'm READY! I think. It's so damn cold in the snow and the muscles used of snowboarding having been getting much of a work out. Wonder if

Fading WinForms StatusBar messages
January 27, 2004 @ 12:42 am

Here’s a quick tip for your Windows Forms status bars. I often need to display status messages when certain tasks complete. For example, if you’re working on an item and Save you want the status bar to let you know that the item was saved. However, I don’t want the statusbar continually stay with this caption, but eventually revert back to some default setting like Ready.

Pictures from last Summer's European stay
January 26, 2004 @ 9:32 pm

I finally got around to updating my pictures from last summer spent in Europe. I had to laugh out quite a bit because there are a few emabarrassing pictures and things in that bunch there. But heck I can make a fool out of myself every once in a while if I choose, right?

2 comments

Windows Forms TextBox and displaying LineFeeds
January 26, 2004 @ 1:03 am

If you have a TextBox/EditBox that contains carriage returns that are single CHR(13) or CHR(10)’s, the textbox displays these characters instead of properly translating them into linefeeds. Now you might say, no big deal – you should be using the appropriate linefeed pairs always anyway and the Textbox itself adds this correctly, but the problem is that if you ever pass data over a Web Service or otherwise encode and decode the data displayed using XML you will find out quickly that all carriage

6 comments

Spammer Blog Comments
January 23, 2004 @ 10:28 am

Checking the BLog this moring I found about 10 new feedbacks to posts. The comments seemed relatively legit, even if somewhat non-specific along the lines of 'This really helped me out thanks'. However, all the backlinks then point back to one spam site or another for yet more generic Viagra or porn sites. Amusing how some people choose to waste their time.

4 comments

Of Toolbar and UI Widget controls for Windows Forms
January 23, 2004 @ 1:38 am

I’ve been taking a look at a number of UI Widget control libraries recently for my Windows Forms apps. I’ve been pretty disappointed by the stuff that ships in the box in .Net - specifically menus and toolbars are stuck in ancient times and don’t really measure up to modern UI guidelines. WinForms Toolbars too have so many quirks that make them next to unusable. So, for the last month or so I’ve been looking at a number of UI libraries and have played with them off an on in a few of my smaller a

7 comments

DataGrid Paging Events not firing
January 20, 2004 @ 3:04 pm

I continually get problems with DataGrids not firing their PageIndexChanged event. I’ve had this issue pop up at least 10 times in the last month and I still can’t explain it although I have a sort of solution which I’ll share at the end. Sort of because it works, but sort of because I have no idea why it does … Here’s what happens: I create a new datagrid, which in many cases is Cut and Pasted from somewhere else in the application to basically ‘inherit’ the visual layout. I then go

188 comments

Sql Server Row Size Limit
January 19, 2004 @ 12:14 pm

Once again I've run into a limitation of SQL Server that really threw me off. SQL Server's Row Byte size is limited somewhere right around 8k bytes for physical data stored in the database. This means if you have a few large varchar or nvarchar fields it's actually quite easy to outrun the size of a row. This doesn't apply to Text or Image fields which are stored separately, but it's still very frustrating.

24 comments

C# vs. VB - Development Tool Envy?
January 17, 2004 @ 12:31 am

I’ve been a big proponent for language equality and have been very vocal in stating that really there’s no big technical reason that C# or VB.Net should be the preferred language for anyone, after all for the 95% part the languages provide the same capabilities in regards to .Net. However, I’ve also been open and have clearly stated that I code exclusively in C# - purely out of my own preference not because of any specific technical reason. In fact although I can read VB code just fine, if I had

33 comments

Collection properties in ASP.Net Server Controls (Building a TabStrip Control)
January 14, 2004 @ 1:52 pm

Creating a tab strip control was a snap and using ASP.Net’s object model was a clean and efficient affair. It basically involved creating a TabPage class, a TabPageCollection class (based on CollectionBase) and then implementing the actual control and rendering mechanism. However, what wasn’t so easy was to create a design time interface. The tab control uses a collection of a TabPage class and getting this collection to properly persist into the HTML from the designer took some guess work and t

29 comments

Detecting Designmode in ASP.Net
January 05, 2004 @ 10:08 pm

Unlike WinForms, ASP.Net does not support a DesignMode property on the Page class, so there's no built in way to detect this. For building custom ASP.Net Server controls (not UserControls) this is crucial since ASP.Net actually renders control in the designer by calling the Render method.

27 comments

Browser Incompatibilities once again
January 05, 2004 @ 12:03 pm

Building server side applications seems to be getting easier and easier with more tools and experience, but the client side of things continues to frustrate the hell out of me as the browser incompatibilities and incomplete object models make building something that is consistent very difficult.

8 comments

IDbCommand and generic Parameters
January 02, 2004 @ 3:19 pm

Here is something that I’ve run into a few times and have not been able to resolve generically. ADO.Net support generic interfaces for most of the data access components to allow writing generic front end code against specific data providers. The idea is that you can cast down any of the specific providers to a generic interface and then use the generic versions in your front end code.

6 comments