Quick Windows Forms Control… a Label with a 3D Line…

Apr 14, 2005 2 min.

I was mocking up a UI yesterday, and I wanted to produce an interface that looked like Front Page’s “New from Template” dialog… But I couldn’t easily replicate those little dividers (for Options, Description, Preview), so I created a “DividerLabel” with about 10 minutes of VB.NET code (2003)… And, if you are so inclined, you can set the text to nothing and you have a line! The Code Imports System.Drawing Imports System.

Windows Media Player and Visual Studio .NET…. anyone else notice any interaction?

Apr 12, 2005 2 min.

Ok, this may seem really odd, but I swear it happened to me… 🙂 Yesterday I decided that I would hook up my headphones and listen to some music at work. I do this all the time at home, but not often in the office. I fired up media player on my laptop and started playing a variety of ripped WMA files. Then I opened up VS.NET 2003 and a fairly large project.

AutoIncrement settings should be applied before filling the DataTable…

Apr 12, 2005 2 min.

I ran into a problem recently, where duplicate IDs were being generated by my offline ADO.NET code… and I had no real idea why this was happening. I had set up the primary key of my DataTable to have the following propery values: AutoIncrement = true AutoIncrementSeed = -1 AutoIncrementStep = -1 This is supposed to result in offline IDs being assigned as -1,-2,-3 and therefore having no possibility of conflict with any real IDs used in the database.

Just noticed that the free mp3 players site has the Creative Zen Micro now…

Apr 11, 2005 1 min.

Of course, the iPod has been available (and widely publicized) through these free sites for a while (shuffle, regular/mini, or photo model all have their own sites), but if you are like me and you want to use a media player that works with more than one brand of device, or if you want to stick with WMA (I have ripped 15 GB of my music into that format, and it works great with my Rio Nitrus and wife’s Rio Cali… so I’m sticking there for the forseeable future!

Interested in Investigating Indigo?

Apr 11, 2005 1 min.

Scott Seely, a former MSDN co-worker of mine and now a member of the Indigo team, is working on a new Indigo book with Brian Nantz. The book won’t be out for a while, but you can get a lot of advance information (including some of the chapters), by watching for updates on www.thatindigobook.com. Should be a great way to get a free taste of some Indigo content right from someone who works on the code…

This is a first for me, some of my code has shipped with an official Microsoft product…

Apr 8, 2005 2 min.

That may not seem like a big deal to most MIcrosoft developers, since most of them write code for that exact purpose, but I have spent most of my time in Redmond writing sample code and even with my switch to development I’m focused on writing internal systems that are not likely to ever be exposed outside of our own users. Recently, the Tablet PC folks released the “Experience Pack for Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005”, which includes the Media Transfer application/power toy.

Cory Smith release new VB.NET game… Checkers Solitaire…

Apr 8, 2005 1 min.

[](http://addressof.com/blog/archive/2005/04/07/1677.aspx) There is even an accompanying [article](http://addressof.com/blog/articles/checkerssolitaire.aspx). Oh, and a challenge: The first person that can send me a history file that shows the gameplay getting to 1 piece left (with the default 8x8x2 game), I'll happily annouce it to the world (at least the readers of this site). Do you have what it takes? If you think you do; let the challenge begin. Even if you can get it down to less than 4, I'll be happy to mention your name as well.

MSDN has Forums!

Apr 8, 2005 1 min.

Looks like I have a new place to hang out and answer questions… http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ …there is even a VB board!

VB6 Resource Center is up…

Apr 7, 2005 1 min.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbrun I kinda missed this launch, but it has been in the works for quite some time so I had an idea that it was on its way… check out Jay’s blog for all the details.

Wearing “sporty” clothes today…

Apr 7, 2005 1 min.

And I’m not trying to be casual… stupid thing is, I went for a run on Monday as part of a “Boot Camp” group fitness program, and it was probably my longest run in the last 12 years… and now my foot is just killing me when I put on my normal shoes. Turns out, when I put my running shoes back on it feels fine, but I’m not a fan of wearing running shoes with my regular work clothes so I went all out today and put on track pants and a T-shirt (along with my comfortable shoes, of course).