Blog posts page 29 of 44

WinForms tricks & tips

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  • 📦 .NET

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?

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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  • 📦 Microsoft

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

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.

The nine finger grip of death

A few weeks ago I got a cut, mysteriously, on my left middle finger right on the outer knuckle joint. In fact on the very spot of an old scar — I forget which of my many little incidents caused that one but it probably involved a BMX and my childhood thirst to perform tricks beyond my ability.

Anyway, this cut bubbled up into a nasty looking thing. A tower of bubble, bubble within a bubble.

Switching from Boot Camp to Parallels

A few weeks ago I managed to screw up my Windows XP installation on my MacBook using some low-level tools and driver related stuff.

I’d already run out of space on the 30GB partition I’d allocated, I was missing the OS X side and not running any 3D applications so I took the plunge to remove the partition entirely and switch over to using the Parallels VM product I’d purchase instead.