VB.NET

The Most Useful .NET Utility Classes Developers Tend To Reinvent Rather Than Reuse

Jannik Anker — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 20:30:14 GMT

- a great little list from Phil Haack (and be sure to read comments as well)...

Tricking out your apps (WinForms)

Jannik Anker — Wed, 03 May 2006 17:18:00 GMT

What I've learned today:

The final application startup tweak we'll discuss is preventing a second instance of the application from starting. Of course, some document-based applications make sense to run multiple times, but many utilities make no sense, or can even cause problems when run this way. It turns out that we can easily make a change to accomplish this. In Visual Basic, you can simply click the Make single instance application checkbox in Project Settings to enable single-instance mode. In C# (and VB for that matter), you can create the same effect in the Main method.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;

public class MyClass
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        bool exclusive;
        Mutex m = new Mutex(true, "C4F-TrickedOut", out exclusive);
        if( exclusive )
        {
            Application.EnableVisualStyles();
            Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);
            Form1 mainForm = new Form1();
            Application.Run();
        }
        else
        {
            MessageBox.Show("Another instance is already running.");
        }
    }
    
    
}

Very nice. More like this here (Coding4Fun)

Component Factory has released their Krypton Toolkit

Jannik Anker — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 16:27:00 GMT

The Krypton Toolkit is a collection of Windows Forms UI controls, built with and targeting VS.NET 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0. You can download a free copy over at componentfactory.com. Phil Wright, the owner of Component Factory, has a blog worth a read.

The New Generation of Microsoft Certifications

Jannik Anker — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 17:02:00 GMT

Once again, I feel like way behind schedule - I haven't gotten around to blogging for a few days due to some work stuff. So in order for me to take time out for blogging, the subject has to be important...

Now, I'm not exactly the first person out there to mention The New Generation of Microsoft Certifications, but it can't get mentioned too much. I was just about to commence my MCAD.NET training when this came out, but it's going to have to wait a while. The new exams are available from early 2006, and I think I'll be going for the Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) in the Web Developer direction.

If I am to spend money failing exams, I want to fail the best ones! Heh...

Yes! VS.NET 2005 is available for (MSDN) download!

Jannik Anker — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 13:18:00 GMT

Via Andrew Connell...

The newest versions of Visual Studio.NET and SQL Server (2005) are now available for download, if you are an MSDN subscriber! If you are not, you'll have to wait till the official release on November 7th. Download size: 2760 MB... Yawn... ;-)

CodeTranslator: Free Code Translation From VB.NET <-> C#

Jannik Anker — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 03:41:00 GMT

Weird. Thought I had already blogged about this genious tool: CodeTranslator: Free Code Translation From VB.NET <-> C# offers a) acceptable translation, b) an option to colorize output - c) as you write!.

Only very few bugs remain, including some parenthesis missing at the end for instance .ToString(). That's pretty easy to live with...

Can't seem to find the post I may or may not have created on this earlier, so I'm giving it another try. (bump? ;-)

Designing .NET Class Libraries

Jannik Anker — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 01:40:00 GMT

Mark Treadwell mentioned a great series of webcasts about Designing .NET Class Libraries.

There's also a link to an Internal Coding Guidelines document for Microsoft coders.

RegExLib.com Regular Expression Cheat Sheet (.NET Framework)

Jannik Anker — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 04:33:00 GMT

Stumbled across this excellent thing: RegExLib.com Regular Expression Cheat Sheet (.NET Framework)

I've never really felt a 100 per cent "safe" when creating RegExp patterns (maybe 80 per cent, okay?)... This makes life much easier when creating a new pattern from scratch (and saves a s...load of debugging time).

[.NET Framework] Backwards Breaking Changes from version 1.1 to 2.0

Jannik Anker — Wed, 25 May 2005 00:52:00 GMT

As of today, 122 breaking changes are being made to the 2.0 version of the framework. I browsed through them quickly - and it's not that bad. This is the updated list.

Phil Winstanley discovered a slightly more curious change to the Framework - if you use SqlCommand.Parameters.Add("@Name","Value");? in .NET 2.0, you will be using deprecated code. You'll even get a compiler warning!

Joel on Software - Making Wrong Code Look Wrong

Jannik Anker — Fri, 13 May 2005 01:10:00 GMT

Joel on Software - Making Wrong Code Look Wrong: "When you start out as a beginning programmer or you try to read code in a new language it all looks equally inscrutable. Until you understand the programming language itself you can't even see obvious syntactic errors.
During the first phase of learning, you start to recognize the things that we usually refer to as "coding style." So you start to notice code that doesn't conform to indentation standards and Oddly-Capitalized variables."

Excellent and well written article on code "organisation"...