Its just 5 days until the awesome Deeper in .NET 2005 event! I know this years event wont be anything less than last years. Go to the http://www.wi-ineta.org site for more information on this event.

AGENDA for the Event
(please visit us online at http://www.wi-ineta.org/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabid=41 for
newest details)

7:00am  - Registration and Check-In for Attendees

7:45am  - Brian Tinkler, Announcements and Introductions

8:00am  - Rocky Lhotka, Creation of Distributed Object-Oriented Applications in .NET

9:30am  - BREAK

9:45am  - Scott Guthrie, ASP.NET 2.0 & Visual Studio Team System

11:45am - LUNCH (provided at Radisson Hotel)
              
               Speaker Q&A Panel from 12pm - 1pm

1:15pm - Rob Howard, Blackbelt ASP.NET Tips & Tricks

2:45pm  - Chris Mayo, ClickOnce with Visual Studio 2005

4:15pm - BREAK

4:30pm  - Jason Beres, Smart Client Applications with WinForms

6:00pm  - Raffle Prize Drawings (must be present to win - thousands of dollars in
prizes)

Here's a little VB.NET code snippet that I wrote to make a Form semi-transparent when moving and resizing it. I think this is a neat little effect to add to an application.

 

Public Class frmTransparentMoveResize

Inherits System.Windows.Forms.Form

Private _OpacityResize As Double = 0.5

Private _OpacityMove As Double = 0.5

Private _OpacityOriginal As Double

Private Const WM_NCLBUTTONDOWN As Long = &HA1

Private Const WM_NCLBUTTONUP As Long = &HA0

Private Const WM_MOVING As Long = &H216

Private Const WM_SIZE As Long = &H5

Protected Overrides Sub DefWndProc(ByRef m As System.Windows.Forms.Message)

Static LButtonDown As Boolean

'Check the state of the Left Mouse Button

If CLng(m.Msg) = WM_NCLBUTTONDOWN Then

'set LButtonDown to True is Left Mouse Button is down

LButtonDown = True

ElseIf CLng(m.Msg) = WM_NCLBUTTONUP Then

'set LButtonDown to False is Left Mouse Button is not down

LButtonDown = False

End If

If LButtonDown Then

If CLng(m.Msg) = WM_MOVING Then

'Set the forms opacity to 50% if user is draging the window

If Me.Opacity <> _OpacityMove Then

_OpacityOriginal = Me.Opacity

Me.Opacity = _OpacityMove

End If

ElseIf CLng(m.Msg) = WM_SIZE Then

'Set the forms opacity to 50% if user is resizing the window

If Me.Opacity <> _OpacityResize Then

_OpacityOriginal = Me.Opacity

Me.Opacity = _OpacityResize

End If

End If

ElseIf Not LButtonDown Then

If Me.Opacity <> _OpacityOriginal Then Me.Opacity = _OpacityOriginal

End If

MyBase.DefWndProc(m)

End Sub

Public Property OpacityMove() As Double

Get

Return _OpacityMove

End Get

Set(ByVal Value As Double)

_OpacityMove = Value

End Set

End Property

Public Property OpacityResize() As Double

Get

Return _OpacityResize

End Get

Set(ByVal Value As Double)

_OpacityResize = Value

End Set

End Property

End Class

 

“Microsoft today is committing to deliver a new version of Internet Explorer for Windows XP customers.  This version, called IE 7, will add new levels of security to Windows XP SP2 while maintaining the level of extensibility and compatibility customers have come to expect from IE.“

Source: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=41507

Why can't IIS implicitly share ASP Session state with ASP.NET?? This is really a drag on starting to convert an ASP application to ASP.NET. Of course, you could use SQL Server to store your Sessions state, but then you'd have to rewrite that portion of your ASP application first. I don't want to, Why can't I just use Session(”myData”) in ASP and ASP.NET and have it point to the same Session value? C'mon guys!!

I went to the WI-INETA meeting last night. Matt Terski presented on Service Oriented Architectures. Matt is an accomplished software architect who has had significant real-world experience working with Fortune 500 customers on developing services oriented architectures with .NET technologies. Matt is also the President of Serlio Software which is located in Wauwatosa, WI. You can view Matt's blog at http://www.terski.com/blog. He provided an awesome presentation explaining the theory and practice of SOA in .NET.

I finally one a door prize. The prize I won consisted of: Visual Studio Tools for Office, a book on .NET development with Office and a book on building InfoPath solutions. Yippee!! I plan on building some cool add-ins/tools for Office; I have to utilize this awesome stuff that I got.

AnyMail 2.0 was released today. AnyMail is an application that allows you to send “anonymous” email messages.

New in Version 2 - Added ability to:
1. Send Attachments
2. CC/BCC email
3. Set message priority
4. Set message body format type (HTML/Plain Text)

In order for messages to be send you need to have the address (URL) of an SMTP Email server that allows the relaying of messages.

Download AnyMail 2.0

Now this is a feature that should have been added to Windows XP. It matches and reflects the Windows XP visual style. Its really neat because instead of just showing the title and icon of an application, it also shows a screenshot of the applications window. For instance, this is expecially usefull when switching between instances of Internet Explorer, since you can easily have 5 or more instances running at a time. Well, at least I do pretty frequently. This isn't something I just discovered, I've actually been using it since it was released.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

I never worked with regular expressions before. I heard how great they can be, but never really knew. Regular expressions are really cool.

RegEx Sample: Number with 0 to 3 decimal places  (|\-)\d+(.\d{3}|.\d{2}|.\d{1}|)

Regular expressions look pretty complex and sort of cryptic at first glance, but if you have a good tutorial to go through it one part at time they aren't really difficult to learn how to write.

This site has some good tutorials on Regular Expressions: http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorialcnt.html

Happy RegEx-ing!!

Well, I didn't find a new bug, but it is the first time I discovered a bug in SQL Server by just doing my everyday job.

I'd post the code for the SQL Server user defined function that I wrote if I could, but I can't (confidential). Its nice to have a reminder once in awhile that even Microsoft's software has bugs.

Server: Msg 8624, Level 16, State 8, Line 1
Internal SQL Server error.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290817