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Showing posts from April, 2010

Free: Great Password Manager

We all have so many user names and passwords. be it work related, Banking, college, 401K, Home, Wireless access admin passwords, yada yada yada and it keeps changing all the time. This is a feeware tool that does it all. User friendly and very secure. Love it.

PSR: Problem Steps Recorder in Windows 7

There is a cool and beneficial tool in Windows 7 called PSR. Just type PSR on the Run command. Then Press the Start Record Button. It records all user interactions with applications running on your PC. When you are done, Press Stop Record and save the generated file ( a .mht file) that can be viewed in a Browser. You should give this a try.

My Plans for this Blog

I intend to post new things I learn or run into or that come to mind on at least a weekly basis. Sometimes may be daily. I'm planning on starting after the course ends so I do disturb the peace of the final project. You have options to unsubscribe yourself from this Blog site completely and you are welcome to stay as you fell like it. It's all up to you. I also would be open and willing to respond to those tough questions you may run into assuming the volume of questions would be manageable...... Knowing you guys, I think it will be very quite in this neighborhood.

I forgot to ask a question about this Blog

I set this up so I receive an e-mail whenever a post or a comment was left by me or anyone else. Do you guys get that option. I know you get the option of subscribing to a particular post/thread, but do you have the option to subscribe to any post or any comment globally and get e-mail? I cannot tell because I'm an Admin and an Author but I made all of you Authors as well. Please could someone let me know. Also, can you guys just let me know if you think this is better than the course info dicussion board or not? TIA

Visual Studio 2010 was released yesterday

Unfortunately, I have just checked the MSDNAA site and they still do not have the release version of Visual Studio 2010. They only have an old Beta2. I would recommend that if you do not have access to Visual Studio 2010 through other means, that you keep an eye on the MSDNAA web site and see if VS2010 becomes available. If and when it becomes available, I would not recommend that you install it while you are finishing CS 503. Download it and save it somewhere and when the course is done, you can knock yourself out :)

Persistence of Wave Manager user's preferences to an XML file

Steve asks: I figured out how to set the background, foreground etc to the user setting config file but I am having trouble saving the opened children widows on closing to the settings. Is it approprate to save this info to the user setting config file? I create a new setting of type String Collection but at start-up when reading the user setting file it is extreamly slow. Would I be better off in the registry. Youssef's Reply: Steve, you have several choices but I believe you may be making it more difficult that it needs to be. Putting some configuration in an xml/config file and the rest in the settings file is not acceptable. The Settings even though may seem straight forward is not the right place and will most likely cause you more grief than it's worth. The choices you had are: 1- Simplest: 1a- Make a UserPreferences class that conatins all the persistent information (WaveBackColor, WaveForeColor, WaveThickness, FileViewFont, etc., and what you need is a StringC

Building help Files for your C#/.NET Code

1- Set your Project Setting to Generate XML as shown below 2- Follow the instructions on the following link http://www.ewoodruff.us/shfbdocs/Index.aspx?topic=html/8c0c97d0-c968-4c15-9fe9-e8f3a443c50a.htm to download Sandcastle and all of its prerequisites. Mainly, for you, it should boil down to 2 items: A- Down load the SandCastle SDK http://sandcastle.codeplex.com/ B- Download SandCastle Help file Builder http://shfb.codeplex.com/ Launch the Sandcastle Help file Builder applications. Add your Assemblies using the File Add Assembly menu and then just press the Build button. Note that building help files takes some time to watch for the detailed progress and be patient. The resultant is a .chm file that you can browse through and search through for your code classes/methods/etc.

Wave Undo

To implement Undo, the simplest way is to use a MemoryStream object in your WaveDisplayForm (MDI Child) and simply serialize the Wave (which should be marked as [Serializable] to the stream and hold on to the stream object. private MemoryStream _undoStream = new MemoryStream(); private bool _canUndo = false; public void SaveForUndo() {      BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter();      bf.Serialize(_undoStream, wave);      _undoStream.Flush();      // This rewinds the stream so that when it is used for deserialization, it's ready to use,     // otherwise, the deserialization will start deserializing from the end of the stream and would fail.      _undoStream.Position = 0;      _canUndo = true; }   public void Undo() {      BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter();      _wave = (Wave)bf.Deserialize(_undoStream);      _canUndo = false;      // increment the modified counter on the wave (However you implemented this), i did it using the following meth

FileSystemWatcher

FileSystemWatcher fires events on a different thread than the thread that it was registered on (mainly the UI thread). If you attempt to update a UI element (such as the FileView's treeview) you will get a "cross-thread..." exception as I showed in class. To avoid this problem, simply Set the "SynchronizingObject" property of the FileSystemWatcher to the FileView (i.e. a UI object in the Main thread) , this will force the FileSystemWatcher event callback handler to be called on the Main UI thread. FileSystemWatcher fw = new FileSystemWatcher(path, "*.wav"); fw.EnableRaisingEvents = true; fw.NotifyFilter = NotifyFilters.FileName; fw.SynchronizingObject = this;