Rick Strahl's Web Log

Weblog Posts in June 2006

Enums, Enum Sets, parsing n' stuff
June 30, 2006 @ 1:42 pm

Enumerated types (Enums) are a great thing especially when you’re coming from a background that didn’t have them as I do (and always cursed it back then). This is a short review of some common rules for enums and using enums with sets of values.

13 comments

Media Player on Vista B2 hoses VS2003 debug session...
June 29, 2006 @ 3:23 pm

Very strange thing happened to me today: When Media Player is running in Vista Beta 2 VS 2003 refuses to debug a Windows Forms application properly and just hangs it before any user code ever runs.

6 comments

Dynamic Themes assignment
June 27, 2006 @ 3:20 am

I'm finishing up some code today for some dynamic skinning of an application and I ran into a funky behavior with themes where changing the theme in web.config seems to have no effect on the pre-compiled application. No big deal, since the app is now actually using an application driven themes assignment mechanism, but it seems odd that this wouldn't work. In this post I show my app driven implementation for switching and assigning themes dynamically.

10 comments

Vista Mobile Device Update now syncs Office 2007
June 24, 2006 @ 3:00 pm

Looks like Windows Update is now bringing down the required Windows Mobile Device Center additions to allow syncing Outlook contacts, calendar, email etc. This has been one big thing missing on my Vista installation and I'm glad to see that this finally showed and didn't require a full reinstall of Vista.

6 comments

Understanding how <% %> expressions render and why Controls.Add() doesn't work
June 24, 2006 @ 1:09 pm

I've been talking about the issue of not being able to call Controls.Add() on a control if the naming container contains <% %> markup expressions. Today I did a little more digging to see exactly what the problem is and here are some thoughts.

11 comments

Adding Rendering with SetRenderMethodDelegate() - aeh, sort of
June 23, 2006 @ 10:47 pm

I ran into SetRenderMethodDelegate today and was thinking it'd be very useful for injecting HTML into a control. Unfortunately it turns out that the delegate is not fired on all controls as there's a dependency on base.Render() calls which apparently are not made by all controls even the stock controls.

10 comments

Virtual PC on Vista Beta 2
June 21, 2006 @ 1:16 am

I’ve been struggling to get Virtual PC to run properly on Vista Beta 2 and today after a few more tweaks here and there I was finally able to make VPC work properly.

15 comments

Working around Controls.Add() and <%= %> Script Limitations with JavaScript
June 20, 2006 @ 4:58 pm

A while back I had lamented some issues with Controls.Add() when script tags where on the page. This gets in the way of generic controls that need to dynamically add content to a page. After some thought I decided that injecting the markup with client side JavaScript code generated from the control would do the trick.

5 comments

PDF this PDF that
June 19, 2006 @ 1:07 am

I'm looking for a few tips on PDF alternatives and some uh, operational hints to perform some common tasks.

7 comments

Cancelling a keystroke in the MSHTML Edit control
June 19, 2006 @ 12:41 am

Overriding a key in the MSHTML Web Browser control to not fire is a little unintuitive as you can't just cancel the key operation - instead you have to override the key itself.

1 comment

Migrating an ASP.NET app to IIS 7
June 18, 2006 @ 1:41 am

I spent some time today to convert an ASP.NET app to run in Integrated Pipeline mode in IIS 7. The process was painless, but of course I wanted to check out some of the new integration features by applying some custom generated content to a static HTML file. In concept very simple, but as it turns out there are few tricks you need to use to manipulate the content correctly.

16 comments

Fun with User Access Control in Vista... Argh!!!
June 16, 2006 @ 1:07 am

I'm trying to get some Windows Files deleted in order to trick Vista into reinstalling some system files that apparently got corrupted. However, even with User Access Control off and an Administrator account I still cannot gain access to some parts of the system.

19 comments

Streaming a PNG file into Response.OutputStream?
June 14, 2006 @ 2:57 am

Here's an odd one. I'm trying to write out a PNG bitmap into the REsponse.OutputStream but the operation fails, while writing a JPG bitmap works just fine.

22 comments

Rounded Corners with CSS
June 13, 2006 @ 6:32 pm

It's not exactly intuitive but with a little work you can encapsulate a rounded corners layout with image references in pure CSS and little bit of markup that is reasonably readable.

12 comments

A File Copy Conflict Dialog Box in Windows? Really?
June 13, 2006 @ 3:08 am

A Windows Explorer dialog that lets you know when a file is in use and retry? You must be kidding? After all these years? Nah it can't be can it?

14 comments

Winforms, Menus, Toolbars and Themes on Vista
June 13, 2006 @ 1:35 am

Themed forms in Windows Vista look pretty bland, because it appears that the stock theme is essentially a simple 'white on white' theming. Theming features in Vista have little effect on the traditional theme settings in WinForms applications, so no matter what theme you use you get the same bland look. Not sure, but if I interpret this correctly this means we're back to being on our own when choosing colors for our applications.

3 comments

Help Builder Command Line Build Support
June 12, 2006 @ 1:26 am

Help Builder doesn't have full command line support, but it does have a full featured COM API. So while you can't directly integrate Help Builder into your Build process with a little bit of extra work using VBScript you can still automate Help Builder builds.

2 comments

Building a FoxPro COM server with a missing Interface definition
June 12, 2006 @ 12:28 am

Ran into a snag today while compiling Help Builder with a missing interface definition for the HTML Help 2.0 SDK. The whole build process ground to a halt due to a missing COM component required to build and off I go to fight the 'machine' to get the tools needed.

1 comment

Biting the Bullet: Running Vista for a week and a half
June 10, 2006 @ 5:26 am

I bit the bullet a week and a half ago and installed Vista on a second hard drive on my laptop. Here's a rambling account of my first impressions with some things good and bad.

6 comments

HtmlTextWriter Musings
June 09, 2006 @ 2:06 am

I'm in the middle of re-writing some older controls that were thrown together a long time ago and never cleaned up to use proper HtmlTextWriter code. Generally using HtmlTextWriter for controls to output HTML is a good idea. Here are a few thoughts regarding a brain block I ran into using BR tags.

14 comments

Graphically challenged
June 05, 2006 @ 3:57 pm

I've been spending a bit of time over the last week cleaning up some of the 'design' of a couple of applications. I'm no graphics designer and I often feel graphically challenged. Here are few thoughts, hey even a question and a few links for things that I found useful.

10 comments