Microsoft is offering some free online lab training on .Net 3.0 for a limited time.
Use this link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/virtuallabs/netframe/default.aspx
Category Archives: .Net
VS.Net for Database Launch Event
Microsoft is releasing “Visual Studio Team Edition 2005 for Database Professionals” (who on Earth comes up with these names????).
MS is holding some launch events all over where you can come (for free) and learn a little about this product, which from what I saw looks pretty slick.
Convert RTF to HTML
More than once I have looked into a way to convert RTF into HTML. Mostly because there are RTF textboxes available for winforms, but you might want to save the page as HTML, and not RTF.
This article shows a way to do this that:
Missing Step in, Step Out and Macros in VS.Net
A while back I had some problems with a coworkers VS.net settings.
They were missing the step in and step out as well as the Macros option in the tools menu.
We were able to get these back by changing the VS.Net settings by going to Tools->Import and Export settings.
Then select to Import settings and pick where you want to backup your current settings.
Then I think we picked “Visual Basic Development Settings” or maybe “General Development Settings.” This seemed to get things back to normal for the most part.
I still have a few problems, like if I am working on some file, that file will not be highlighted in the solution explorer (what a pain) and I can’t right click on a webform and select “View Code” (what a pain).
It looks like MS was trying to make it really customizable, but I think they ended up making it a pain to get things working the way you expect them to.
UPDATE:
I was able to quickly find a setting to make sure that the current page I was working on became tracked in Solution Explorer:
AJAX Toolkit Library Growing
A while back I was looking at the AJAX toolkit page (http://ajax.asp.net/ajaxtookit) and I was really not impressed with anything I saw.
Things like the “Confirm” button, which is basically a button with 10 seconds of javascript coding built into it isn’t a big deal, IMO.
But their list of controls has really grown and there are some really interesting things in that toolkit.
It still boggles my mind that they don’t have an autocomplete dropdown list where your selections are LIMITED to the choices from the list.
Printing Vb.Net Forms with PrintForm Component
Microsoft has released their first 3 Power Packs for Visual Basic 2005, which are “free Add-Ins, Controls, Components, and Tools for you to use with Visual Basic 2005 to make developing great applications even easier.”
1 of the first 3 is the Microsoft PrintForm Component 1.0 , which gives you the ability to easily print a form.
I could have really used this on my last project, where I manually wrote the code to do just that.
Make Use Of Culture in SQL Reporting Services Local Reports
When using SQL Reporting services, you can format things such as dates and currency.
However, depending on the situation you might want to:
- Show a report with culture X on a computer running culture Y.
- Show a report using the same culture settings as the local computer.
To do (1), all you have to do is set the “Language” parameter of the local report in design time.
To get (2) to work, you need to set the Language parameter of the report as the expression “=User.Language”. This will set the report culture as the culture that the hosting program is running under.
If you have a program that you need to switch between different cultures, you can do so with the following line of code (which changes the culture to “English-Ireland”)
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = New Globalization.CultureInfo(“en-IE”, False)
More information can be found at: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms156493.aspx
Convert a String to a Byte Array in VB.Net
I had a snippet on my site for converting a byte array to a string, but I didn’t have anything for going the other way.
This function should do the trick.
Public Shared Function StringByByteArray(ByVal s As String) As Byte()
Return System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(s)
End Function
Regular Expressions Tutorial
This is really a great tutorial on using regular expressions.
http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html
The information is broken down into sections, which appear on the left hand side.
Default Buttons in ASP.NET 2.0
ASP.NET has this thing where pressing Enter on a page will cause it to be submitted, but no submit action is taken, mostly because you can have multiple buttons on a page, and it isn’t sure which button it should consider clicked when you press enter.
The solution to this was the “__EVENTTYPE” field. Click here for more info on __EVENTTYPE.
Thankfully ASP.NET 2.0 has introduced some new features to help remove this complexity.
Scott Gu blogs about the new form defaultButton property, as well as the new SetFocusOnError property of the validators here:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/08/04/421647.aspx
Chris May 