Wow.  If this is what a "Professional" is now expected to know, I'm sad for .Net.

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Last month an alert went out from Microsoft about a severe vulnerability in ASP.Net.  A quick workaround was stepped through but the kernal of the issue remained.

I just got this email blast from the DotNetNuke folks (very very nice of them even as I am no longer a Nuke user) about the official patch now being available as direct download AND NOW Windows Update.

No matter your OS, if you run ASP.Net you should get the updates.  If money is on the line then of course you have to check the fine print and scan the comments of Scott Guthrie's blog post and do extra testing ASAP in case you are doing some off-kilter code that hits a boundary of the patch. 

It's not a huge deal anymore to use Hex values for colors in web pages, since Netscape3+ and IE both handle basically the same set of user-friendly color text values, but sometimes we need to feel like getting geeky helps cover the bases.

As with most things on the smithvoice.com sitelett, we found that we were typing this out by memory just often enough to make it tedious yet not often enough that our fingers could do it while we were watching TV. So we put it here for our future cut & pasting, and if it helps you too then so much the better.

Happy New Year!  Here's the code for a SOLID flay/popup winform combobox !

The XP GUI flat style (some call it the Retro-Apple style) is neat and clean.

The VS.net splitter control is a nice addition.

But together, they can be annoying to the users ... at first.

The splitter offers three border styles: "None", "FixedSingle" (draws a line around the rectangle) and "Fixed3D." Problem is that the 3d option does what most of us feel is the opposite of what we need, it insets rather than popping up.

The new IDE print function is really nice, esp since it can show line numbers that make reviews easier to follow.

If you do a print and get the line numbers right but your source code is all gibberish, look to the printer-specific options in the Advanced form of the printing popup.

The graphic below shows that the typical office HP PS printer will default to having TrueType fonts be substituted with a device font that is loaded on the printer. Most likely the device "hardfont" will not map characters exactly. Just switch the option to "Download as Softfont" and your code will come out the way you want it.

Config files for .Net programs are great, just stick your required dynamic information (connect strings, global defaults, etc) in an XML file in the same location as your executable and read them with the built-in methods.

But there are limitations:

1) By default, they're only for exe's, dlls can't use them

2) An AutoDeploy app is hosted in a special cache on the user machine, and the config from the server location doesn't follow it around.

Here's the answer...

featured in Mike Gunderloy's Sybex Press book ADO AND ADO.NET Programming"

If you're a big iron RDBMS coder, consider that dynamically created Jet files as middleware have come in very handy for lots of folks using Oracle and SQLServer in the enterprise, so this is not just a power for those using Jet as a core source.

Years ago we noticed that we were spending more time writing DAO object code than working with data. So we took an afternoon and wrote the first SmithVoice.com DBCodeCreator. It saved us lot of time and other devs seemed to like it so we started giving it away on the SmithVoice.com sitelett.

Some folks hate graphics coding. A guy I know told me that when he sees "X,Y" he starts running. Gotta say (because I've ended up doing a lot of XYs in most every language I've used)... the thing I fear is adding a huge image processing 3rd party widget to my apps ... they never seem to do exactly what is needed and they always take up too many resources (oh, and they are never inexpensive!).

Here comes .net, again, with a way to make old hardships easier.

This demo shows how to use System.Drawing to do something useful: Print cd case inserts and optional back-covers. That means printing rectangles, text and rotated text. What's more it shows how to...

Thanks to DSL, everyone can host a website and mailserver or two (or 15) out of their home. All it takes is buying a domain, using a DNS service to redirect requests to your static or dynamic IP, switching on IIS in your Win2k/XP Pro or Win2kServer and running IISLockdown to close all those extra ports you don't want exposed to the script kiddies

Pretty much it's a cakewalk. Until you start relying on it.

I was tired of coming home and finding that my PPPOE (Point to Point Protocol Over Ethernet) connection was dropped; squirrels swinging on my lines, the evil local phone company not liking my 3rd party DSL provider, whatever the reason it was annoying. Sometimes it would chug along for weeks