Regular readers might remember my whole Converting a project to Unicode series in nine parts:

Part 0 (The introduction)

Part 1 (Business before pleasure)

Part 2 ('Sorry, you're not my type.' 'Um, maybe I could change that?)

Part 3 (Can I quote you on that?)

Part 4 (/Delightful, /Delicious, /DUnicode!)

Part 5 (Are we there yet? Well, not just yet)

Part 6 (Upon the road not traveled)

Part 7 (What does it mean to fit things to a 'T', anyway?)

Part 8 (Fitting MSLU into the mix)

Part 9 (The project's postpartum postmortem)

One of the lingering questions in many people's minds (now that they can't ask anymore why no useful samples exist!) is why there aren't more tools to help with this process.

Luckily, MVP Mihai Nita is not sitting around waiting for such tools to be built!

Take a look over on his site at ToUnicode – Automating some of the steps of Unicode code conversion (Windows), for a tool that takes many of these steps and tries to automate them.

This strikes me as an effort that can only get better over time. and one that needs to keep on getting better as the need becomes greater and greater....

Now this does not let the people who ought to be doing more here off the hook, believe me. But the better the external efforts get, the more foolish the internal folks look for not doing more here.

And Visual Studio just got served!

Thanks Mihai -- I not only owe you a book, I now also owe you a beer! :-)

 

All of the characters in Unicode have taken off for Grand Cayman for the Christmas holiday weekend
(they are staying at the Marriott Grand Cayman Beach Hotel in case you are there and are curious at all the characters hanging out by the pool!)

AFP - Care to rub shoulders, virtually speaking, with the likes of supermodel Naomi Cambell or fashion icon Jean-Charles de Castelbajac?

A Visual Studio .NET 2008 Debugger Visualizer for the Color structure

Most mocking frameworks, and especially the two most popular ones, Rhino Mocks and TypeMock, use a record/reply/verify model where the developer invokes members on the mock during the record phase, does a replay to prepare the mock for those expectations, and finally do a verify before the test ends.

From Rhino documentation (emphasis mine):

Record & Replay model - a model that allows for recording actions on a mock object and then replaying and verifying them. All mocking frameworks uses this model...

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WPF NavigationWindow is a very handy class that allows you to easily build Vista-like wizards, or any kind of window that resembles the browser-style navigation:

  

The NavigationWindow will automatically handle the Backspace, Back/Next keys and perform the appropriate navigation on the window pages.

If you're combining this class with the WindowsFormsHost to integrate WinForms controls, you may hit a very annoying bug: if there are textboxes in your WinForm control, hitting Backspace while editing the input on it will cause the navigation window to navigate back, instead of deleting the text on the TextBox. Yikes! ...

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A new method for Extending Microsoft Office 2007 User Interface using MFC/ATL and .NET technologies.

Hi All!

Just wanted to say Merry Christmas to everyone. I know l stopped blogging about 6 months ago but the reason behind that was I became a dad for the first time and little Sofia came into our lives.

 Now everyone says this and I can vouch that it is true, when you do have a kid it is fantastic (yes there are sleepless nights although we have been very lucky in that respect) and you put many other things to the side.

I'm manage to squeeze in some time to stay up-to-date on the latest .Net tech (and some non .Net related things) but haven't had the time to keep my Points of interest posts going (possibly in the new year).

I've been following Silverlight with great interest and I'm glad it has been rebranded as Silverlight 2.0 as 1.1 didn't sit right. I'm also glad about the extended feature set but hope they include some of the features I feel would ease adoption (printing support [add your vote] http://silverlight.net/forums/t/516.aspx etc).

.Net 3.5 is out which is great (just need to find a project where I can actually use it) and I've been following the Fran's posts (http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/) about Linq to LLBLGen Pro with interest. I've used every release Fran's has put out but feel he is going to gain a much bigger audience when he has a friendlier way of utilising the code LLBLGen generates.

Anyway have to keep this short and sweet as I'm at the in-laws for Christmas dinner in Denmark.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all.

Roll on 2008.

John

This tutorial examines the new Visual Studio 2008 Server Control and Server Control Extender. A compendium of tips, tricks and gotchas, it is a comprehensive tutorial that will provide readers with the skills necessary to start building advanced AJAX-enabled custom controls with Visual Studio.

Using Humax v0.2, this article is going to explain how to write and apply aspect-oriented/metadata driven programming in JavaScript.

One of the blog's readers from Italy, Fabio Cozzolino has written a interesting host for WCF that gets and merges configuration from different configuration files. You can download the code from his post, which is completely in Italian. (Anyway, the code is not, it is English).

This could be a good solution to separate the configuration in logical partitions or divisions, and then, have a central host that consolidates all the configuration (It is a server side solution).  

If you are a typical TFS user like me, then you must bookmarked these 2 links / tools already:

1. Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server Power Tools
2. Visual Studio Team System Web Access (formerly known as TeamPlain)
   

Colt

So, the other day, someone was asking for a TextBox that would better support decimal or currency values:

What he want is a simple control to allow him to enter decimal or currency values.  He would prefer behavior that looks a lot more like a standard text box, rather than showing the mask or dictating the number of digits. He'd like it to be aware of the decimal functionality and handle it properly (e.g. he want to be able to type 1.23 regardless of how long the entry can be).

This seems like such a simple and fundamental control.

He suggests that .NET Framework would provide such a control.

Somebody over on the .NET Framework team had an interesting answer:

We wrote a full-featured sample DecimalTextBox control that can be installed from here.

Now I did find the control to be an interesting sample.

With that said, I gave a hard time calling anything that does not handle the globalization side of the equation full-featured, if you know what I mean.

The problems with the control?

Well, it uses NumberFormatInfo.CurrentInfo for its number formatting information, which means that it does not pick up user overrides -- and thus if the user customizes their settings, the customizations are not picked up.

And of course there is no mechanism to pick up user changes that happen after launch, either.

It does not do anything special to handle bidirectional support.

Its notions about group separators have severe limitations.

Now I do think such a control could indeed be useful worldwide, but I can't help feeling the whole internationalization issues section of the spec could have used a little more research, and subsequent to that research, a little more support.

Because full-featured in this market, coming from Microsoft, has to mean full support for all of our customers, not just the ones with "convenient" settings....

 

This post brought to you by , (U+002c, aka COMMA)

I had to reboot the machine and now it's working fine. Rick is also facing some issues with VS 2008. Hopefully, this will be cured soon.

This article shows you how to bring revolutionary UI provided by MS Silverlight to the world of ASP.NET control development with the help of recent released ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP

Just before Christmas as well :-)

Download DSA 0.3

New features for this release include:

• Probability Search
• Power algorithm
• Greatest common denominator algorithm
• Reverse words algorithm
• Set collection (will be renamed to OrderedSet in DSA 0.4 and an unordered Set will be introduced in DSA 0.4 as well)
• Sequential search
• Merge sort
• Merge ordered

Some other not so major features include:

• Pseudo code for around 75% of everything to enable easy language ports (100% of everything will be in DSA 0.4 - the paper to screen conversion is taking a while)
• Queue and Stack have been dropped - DSA will only support collections not in the BCL
• ArrayList is being dropped in DSA 0.4
• Complete XML documentation for every public algorithm/data structure - also private methods are XML doc'd as well.

Also this is the first release to include offline documentation (or documentation of any kind excluding XML docs).

Download DSA 0.3

DSA 0.4

This release will be out mid February and will introduce some new key algorithms and collections.  I am in the process of finalizing the features to be added in DSA 0.4 but you can expect more tree data structures as well as balancing algorithms to further optimise tree data structures.  I will post something when this is finalized - will be the back end of December.

Download DSA 0.3

Thank you for your support and if there is anything you would like to suggest then it is not too late...also if you find any issues please let me know.

Legion is a grid computing platform that uses the Silverlight CLR to execute user definable tasks. It provides grid-wide thread-safe operations for web clients. Client performance metrics, such as bandwidth and processor speed, may be used to tailor jobs. Also includes a WPF Manager application.

A simple method to achive interprocess communications between the .NET framework and MFC

Big Blue agrees to acquire in-memory database software provider Solid Information Technology, backed by Apax Partners and CapMan, for an undisclosed sum.

This article looks at strengths of the .NET platform regarding numerical analysis, tips for increased performance of .NET applications, capabilities of IMSL C# Numerical Library for Microsoft .NET applications, and features that allows the .NET Framework to be used for advanced analytics.

An article on building a practical business application using Silverlight animations