Blog posts page 29 of 44

Localizing .NET web applications

It seems that globalization often makes the wish list of many a web site until the client realizes professional quality translations require a significant investment of time and money.

On occasion however smaller web applications with their limited vocabulary are prime targets for localizationlocalization globalization and it can be quite feasible to translate the couple of hundred strings involved.

Reinstalling Windows XP on a 750GB monster

My first ever hard-disk was a whopping 2GB when 340MB was considered high-end.Β  Β£800 meant it was a steal – an end-of-line trade-only offer…

A massive double-height 5.25β€³ SCSI behemoth from DEC that sounded like a turbine powering up. It had a gyroscopic effect that could whip your hand off and a seek noise that resonated through the house in the early hours of the morning as another caller trawled Black Ice BBS’s file library.

WinForms tricks & tips

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I’m not sure why it doesn’t do this as standard but a simple event handler should do the trick:

People have asked (in the IRC #CSharp) why adding text to a TextBox is so slow and flickery. Normally they are trying:

One small step for web standards, one giant download for automatic update

Automatic Update screen-shot showing Internet Explorer 7.0 downloadInternet Explorer 7 has just offered to install itself on my machine helpfully already downloaded, all 14.8MB, by Windows Automatic Update.

One can assume that IE’s market share will shift from 6 to 7 practically overnight unless significant numbers reject the update or have switched Automatic Update off completely.

Compile XNA for your Xbox 360 tomorrow?

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There’s a possibility that tomorrow will see the announcement of XNA Game Studio Beta 2 with support for compiling and running applications on your Xbox 360.

Originally this was scheduled for the final 1.0 release and would involve a $99 annual fee for the privilege but what better way to get hype and excitement than to offer it free for a month or two while it’s being polished and tested during the beta phase?

Icon and task-bar tools for Windows

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A few things bug me about the Windows user interface and as I currently have no inclination to head over to Vista I thought it was about time I dug around and found some tools to address the job.

Windows will often make a mess of your desktop by moving the icons around normally because the resolution switched.

Parameterising the IN clause of an SQL SELECT in .NET

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I’m a fan of parameterized queries with a strong dislike for building SQL (or other magic strings). Encoding, escaping errors, localization formatting problems and injection can run rampant when you think everything is a string.

Today I found myself a quandary as I needed to SELECT records based on a list of values I had. e.g.