Rick Strahl's Web Log

Weblog Posts in August 2004

FrontPage Contortions
August 26, 2004 @ 8:04 pm

Renaming a directory in IIS and getting VS and even worse FrontPage to recognize those changes is an excercise in contortionism.

2 comments

Visual subclassing ASP.NET forms and user controls with visual content?
August 26, 2004 @ 10:49 am

How do you visually subclass Forms or Controls? The answer is it's not really possible to do this. However, with a little understanding of how the page inheritance works you can at least abstract your UI logic into a base class... it ain't pretty, but it works.

4 comments

First impressions of a newbie PocketPc user
August 24, 2004 @ 11:32 am

So I broke down and got an IPAQ a while back. My first impression is that this platform needs a lot of work both in usability as well as with content focused at this format.

3 comments

Music Match bites the big one
August 23, 2004 @ 11:56 pm

Music Match dies for a version upgrade.

12 comments

Hairy Adventures in C++
August 21, 2004 @ 8:24 am

Needing a small self contained EXE to perform some tasks I decided to use C++ to create this thing. Many frustrating hours later I feel lucky to not have to code in C++...

6 comments

Systernals Process Explorer - Must have tool for developers
August 19, 2004 @ 12:05 pm

Process Explorer is a replacement for Task Manager on steroids. If you're a developer and need to see what's going on with applications you need to use this tool.

4 comments

Why West Wind Html Help Builder is NOT a .NET Application
August 18, 2004 @ 7:55 pm

The question invariably comes down to: Do you have a .NET version of Help Builder. I’ve answered this with the same response for quite some time: NO! My counter question is: Does it REALLY matter? The answer really boils down to three things: Return on investment Benefit of a conversion Technological issues.

14 comments

Creating a CommandBar and adding Commands to it in a VS.NET Add-in
August 15, 2004 @ 11:54 am

I’ve been spending a bunch of time trying to get everything working correctly for my Help Builder Add-In and I thought I’d summarize the part that’s been the most painful about this plug-in which has been getting the damn menu to behave correctly. It's not a terribly difficult task, but one that is badly documented and if you do things a little bit out of the ordinary as I do apparently, not quite as easy as it seems. In the process I've provided a few useful wrappers that hopefully will help ot

14 comments

System.Type.Missing
August 14, 2004 @ 1:41 pm

Passing parameters to COM objects often involves passing in optional values that are not required and sometimes not easy to figure out. Using System.Type.Missing allows 'omitting' these parameters effectively. How did I miss this for this long?

1 comment

Switching CurrentCulture in ASP.NET Pages Gotchas
August 13, 2004 @ 8:07 am

Switching the CurrentCulture in ASP.NET is almost trivial to do, but beware of some of the side effects it might have on your applications.

6 comments

VS Add-In CommandBar Hell
August 12, 2004 @ 1:45 pm

More struggleing with CommandBar objects for adding a new menu at a specific location in the menu, and removing a CommandBar cleanly.

7 comments

Rendering lines/HR Tags in Mozilla and IE
August 12, 2004 @ 8:36 am

One thing that I notice a lot is the HR tag which in Mozilla does not respond to style tag attributes as it does in IE. The result is that HR tags ALWAYS display in the archaic 3D format of a 90’s browser...

11 comments

Google Toolbar Autofill quirks
August 11, 2004 @ 9:31 am

I've had a few problems with the Google Toolbar's Autofill features and here are a few things you can do to make sure the Google Autofill works with your Web forms.

48 comments

Help Builder SNAFU and VB.NET integration added
August 09, 2004 @ 9:04 am

Bonehead install moves and some more updates and thoughts on the Help Builder VS.NET integration

2 comments

How I use some of the new Visual Studio .NET features of HTML Help Builder
August 06, 2004 @ 9:35 am

I have released Help Builder 3.50 Beta today and I'd thought I'd post a few notes on how I use the new Visual Studio .NET integration features in my own daily documentation work. When I originally created the Add-In I was merely Ho-hum about the utility it would provide but now that it's here I wouldn't want to work without it any more...

Automating a .NET WinForm through COM Interop
August 02, 2004 @ 10:06 am

Somebody asked an interesting question today on how to automate a Windows Form from a COM client application. .NET doesn’t support building EXE COM servers so it’s not as easy as it was in say Visual FoxPro or VB to simply create a COM public form and have it exposed as a COM object and fire away at the methods and properties. Here I discuss how you can expose WinForms to COM Automation by creating your forms in DLLs or creating a wrapper DLL that calls into the WinForms EXE application to insta

10 comments