At a customer's site, an application needed to format and accept formatted input for currencies. They had already made several attempts at getting the .NET 2.0 WinForms MaskedTextBox to behave the way they wanted, without success. A quick search reveals that they were not the only ones struggling with this issue. However, Irena Kennedy [1] … Continue reading A Currency MaskedTextBox for .NET 2.0
I couldn't blame anyone for thinking that this blog is dead. However, it's not. I could come up with scores of excuses as to why I haven't posted anything, but that won't serve any valuable purpose. Rather, I'd like to write something about the subjects I can post about, namely The betas of Windows Vista … Continue reading Blog is Still Alive, Although on Life Support
While converting a project from VS.NET 2003 to Visual Studio 2005, I also converted the unit tests to the Visual Studio Team System unit testing framework. While I believe that the unit testing framework in VS 2005 has merits, I am not sure if I am ready to dump NUnit. NUnit has a major advantage … Continue reading Difference Between NUnit and Visual Studio Team System Unit Testing Framework
A customer asked me if it was possible to create a post-build event in Visual Studio 2005 that would only be run if the active mode was "Debug." A brief search in the Internet (using A9.com, to keep getting "a piece of the Π") revealed that there was no "built-in" support or any solution previously … Continue reading Conditional Build Events in Visual Studio 2005
During my talk at the Alabama Code Camp, I demonstrated how you can host a SOAP web service in a WinForms application (or a Windows Service, etc.). However, my solution required the use of SOAP over TCP, which does make it less interoperable. Angel Machin has a post that would allow any .NET application to … Continue reading Hosting HTTP Web Services without IIS
The Alabama Code Camp last Saturday was, from my perspective, a success. I thought that attendance was high and the quality of the sessions I attended good to very high. Thanks to the sponsors for enabling this (including a "free lunch"). The only side of the event I liked less was the venue. Computer classrooms … Continue reading Alabama Code Camp: Great Event
Today, someone asked me if it was possible to make Excel highlight the column and the row of the cell that is selected. Excel already highlights the column and row header, but when working on a high-resolution screen, that does not help much in ensuring that you are actually entering data in the right cell. … Continue reading An Improved Excel Color Banding Solution
Alabama .NET code community, if you were not already aware, mark your calendars: on October 29th, the first Alabama Code Camp will be held in Birmingham. It's an event for developers by developers, and registration is free (but required). You can find registration information, directions, and session listings at their web site. I will be … Continue reading Alabama Code Camp: October 29th
Not that I generally tend to complain about features I don't use, but I really wonder who suggested the following feature. Classes (in code view) in the editor (at least for VB.NET) now have an active properties window, i.e. there actually are properties listed for classes. Actually, there are possible attributes listed for classes. To … Continue reading VS 2005 Bloat
After reading two blog posts ([1], [2]) about Nullable Types and consulting the beta documentation for .NET 2.0, here is what works in VB.NET (and not more than that from what I can gather): Dim i As System.Nullable(Of Integer) i = 10 ' Nothing new here | pun intended ;o) i = Nothing ' OK, … Continue reading .NET 2.0: Nullable types in VB.NET
Sven Aelterman 