Coding out and about without my libraries drive and hit that old, old, old bug of user controls not making it easy to tell you when you're in Designmode if you nest subclassed UCs. Felt like a noob fool, had to waste time running through all of the forum posts of hacks that still don't work.. till I found this one. It's not mine but it's better than mine in that it works (for me) across the nesting scenarios even when called from a grandchild control. Now I'm glad I forgot my drive :).

The code is in an Anonymous comment, in case that page goes away, I put it here.

Why does the simple DesignMode feature that was spot-on in the VB5/6 era still elude the VS team after ten years of .Net? 

Thanks Anonymous!

Interesting Los Angeles Developers Meetup at Blank Spaces on Wilshire. John Shiple of FreelanceCTO.com talking about Tech Trends and getting your business to be a business.

Here it is in Flash audio. (iPeople please use a 'puter or android. Jobs is dead but his restrictions on you live on)

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

[more]

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.

Still caching after all these years

I was making a forms based ASP.Net login system, a pretty typical one that used an ascx across all pages to display a hyperlink "Log In" or "Log Out" depending on whether HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name had a value or not. The "Log In" link would redirect to a logon page and the Log Off link would of course redirect to a page that killed the authentication cookie in it's Page_Load and gave the user the message that they were logged off successfuly.

When I did the log offs, I killed the ticket and just for good measure called Session.Abandon, and with that extra line I felt smug that I did more than I needed.

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...