DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by ke3bzkick

IE8, Microsoft and the Reverse Fanboys

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 06:16:02 GMT

As the beta test of IE8 recently became available we are quickly approaching the release of another version of Internet Explorer. Much frustration has been expressed about the issues (or supposed issues ) in this beta. Some of this concern is definitely understandable, however, I think some of the negativity is present just because IE is a Microsoft product.

.NET runs on Linux, Mac OSX and FreeBSD ?

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:31:04 GMT

Good news. GNU adds support for .net apps in OpenSource world.

New BlogEngine.NET Extension - SlideShow Photo Gallery

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 04:01:02 GMT

I've wanted to build a BlogEngine.NET extension to display a photo gallery since I first starting using this product. Vertigo has made my job easier with Slide.Show, a rich Silverlight application that provides an elegant and simple photo sharing user experience. It also supports direct Flickr integration that I have included as a part of this extension. All you have to do is change one configuration value in the configuration.xml and you are all set to hook into your Flickr account. A live demo can be found at http://dannydouglass.com/page/photogallery.aspx. My website offers a popup version of this gallery (click the "photos" tab above) that I would be glad to explain in a follow-up post if there is any interest. [Requires Silverlight 1.0]

Creating a transparent Panel in .NET

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:01:02 GMT

Today I wanted to create a transparent Panel-Control in .NET in order to superimpose it on the WebBrowser Control in order to record click events. The goal was to code a simple macro recorder for websites. Unfortunatelly the .NET framework does not allow (in an easy way) to make a control fully transparent. So it was back to the good ol' winuser.h and the extended window styles. Namely 0x00000020L or as it is better known WS_EX_TRANSPARENT.

Expression Tree Basics

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 04:01:09 GMT

Newcomers to LINQ often find expression trees difficult to grasp. In this post I hope to show that the subject is not quite as difficult as it might appear at first. Any reader who has an intermediate level understanding of LINQ should find the material in this post easy to grasp. An expression tree provides a method of translating executable code into data. This can be very valuable if you want to modify or transform code before executing it. In particular, it can be useful if you want to transform C# code such as a LINQ query expression into code that operates on another process, such as a SQL database. But I'm getting ahead of myself. By the end of this post you will find it easy to understand why it is helpful to translate code into data. First I need to provide a little background. Let's start by seeing the relatively simple syntax for creating an expression tree.

Best VS Fonts and Settings EVER

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 04:46:02 GMT

Okay the title is a bit over the top :) Recently I was playing around with the vs settings after reading Scott Hanselman's article on black/white IDE colors and came up with this. Take a look and let me know what you think. Maybe it will be your new color scheme in VS...