Section: Blogs

DataGrid programming…

Dec 9, 2004 1 min.

Customizing the data grid (in Windows Forms) was always one of the most popular topics on the C# or VB developer centers, so I’m sure a lot of people will be interested in this article. It is in C#, so far, but if you’d like to see it in VB I’d suggest you email the writer (email at the bottom of the article). Styling with the DataGridColumnStyle, Part 1

I just can’t get enough Penny Arcade…

Dec 5, 2004 1 min.

He was talking about the generic bad guys in the new Prince of Persia game, but this line crosses into Halo, and it is so true… “Halo has those little grunts, and I guess I’m supposed to feel like a bad-ass when I destroy them but I actually just feel like an asshole. They both seem like races that just fell in with the wrong crowd. What they need are compelling after school activities, not death.

Drawing rotated text…

Dec 2, 2004 2 min.

A customer emailed me today (via the VB FAQ blog) with a question; “how can I output text at different angles, to write the cardinal points around a compass for example…” so I decided to fire up a quick sample Public Enum Direction As Integer N = 0 NW = 1 W = 2 SW = 3 S = 4 SE = 5 E = 6 NE = 7 End Enum Protected Overrides Sub OnPaint(ByVal e As System.

Halo 2 Stats via RSS… an interesting idea that I think could be improved

Nov 23, 2004 2 min.

I like that Bungie is exposing your stats as RSS (see mine here), but it would be cooler if they had added some additional elements and attributes to the feed to describe the games in a more usable format, rather than just in HTML… instead of; ``` <font color="#000080"><title>Rumble Pit: Oddball on Ascension<font color="#000080"></title> <font color="#000080"><link>http://www.bungie.net/stats/gamestats.aspx?gameid=8132172&player=Festive Turkey<font color="#000080"></link> <font color="#000080"><pubDate>Fri, 19 Nov 2004 07:45:07 GMT<font color="#000080"></pubDate> <font color="#000080"><guid>http://www.bungie.net/stats/gamestats.aspx?gameid=8132172&player=Festive Turkey<font color="#000080"></guid> <font color="#000080"><description> Game played at Fri, 19 Nov 2004 07:45:07 GMT<br/><br/>Playlist: Rumble Pit<br/>Oddball on Ascension<br/><br/> <b>Gamertag (Team): Score, Kills, Deaths, Assists</b> <br/>l obvious l (1): 59, 14, 9, 5<br/>ScottyAK (0): 52, 16, 10, 6<br/> BK Assassin (2): 29, 6, 9, 1<br/>MAXODeeZ (3): 18, 7, 12, 4<br/> BattlingWheel (4): 15, 10, 13, 5<br/>Festive Turkey (5): 6, 5, 11, 5<br/> snackasaurus (6): 0, 6, 7, 6<br/>LionWrath716 (7): 0, 1, 0, 0<br/> <font color="#000080"></description><font color="#000080"></item>``` they could add a namespace reference for Halo or Bungie….

An interview with Rocky about VB.NET

Nov 10, 2004 1 min.

[ Rocky Lhotka discusses VB.NET’s focus on business application development.](http://www.theserverside.net/talks/index.tss) (from TheServerSide.NET)

Less frustrated&#8230;

Nov 10, 2004 1 min.

I love the internet for one main reason…. porn. Or is the fact that everyone is willing to help you when you have a problem? Oh yeah, it is that second one. I posted recently about my frustrating experiences with trying to create a CSS based site layout for my site, and a bunch of people chimed in to help me out. Well, with their help, and after reading some of the articles on A List Apart, I was able to get a very basic layout working in both IE and Firefox… although it doesn’t currently work in Opera, which surprised me a bit…

Frustrated with my own incompetence&#8230;

Nov 8, 2004 1 min.

I’ve been rebuilding my site to use master pages (which is done and works great!) and along the way I decide to get rid of the tables used to create my top and side menu areas, moving instead to a CSS model… No idea why, but I can’t get it to do what I want!! I’ve created a CSS based right off of a sample that is baked into Dreamweaver, and then tried to wrap the right styles around my content, but the main area of my page is appearing below the side menu, not floating alongside… bah.

MSDN Team Bios up :)

Nov 5, 2004 1 min.

A variety of folks (including me) associated with the online MSDN site have their bios up at http://msdn.microsoft.com/aboutmsdn/team/default.aspx

HTML to XHTML

Nov 2, 2004 1 min.

I have been pondering the best approach for ensuring user supplied HTML is XHTML… and while it actually isn’t hard to validate whether or not a given block of HTML is valid XHTML, what I really wanted was something that would fix up some of the more basic errors. Well, MSDN Magazine to the rescue… Web Q&A: ADO.NET Joins, HTML to XHTML, ASP.NET ViewState, and More ADO.NET Joins, HTML to XHTML, ASP.

Visual Basic Usage Survey posted&#8230;.

Oct 30, 2004 1 min.

The VB team is interested in collecting some stats about how you use VB, so I put a simple survey up for them at http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/visualbasicsurvey/, feel free to check it out if you are interested in providing information… For whoever is interested, I used the http://www.nsurvey.org/ software to create this survey…