a geek trapped in a cool guy's body » Missing .NET

The Missing .NET #8: Displaying Enums in Windows Forms

Jason Kemp — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:51:52 +0000

The .NET framework is huge, but not so huge that it does everything for everyone; there are things that they in Redmond miss or don’t do for whatever reason but is still generally applicable to many developers. So, dear reader, I present to you a series of posts on stuff I find missing in .NET, [...]

© 2008 Jason Kemp. All Rights Reserved. A geek trapped in a cool guy's body

The Missing .NET #8: Displaying Enums in Windows Forms

The Missing .NET #7: Displaying Enums in WPF

Jason Kemp — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 01:52:31 +0000

Enums are here to stay and we have to deal with them in various ways; displaying them to the user is one way they have to be dealt with. I'll give a treatment of how to display an enum in WPF in this post. You'll see that displaying them in all situations is non-trivial.

© 2008 Jason Kemp. All Rights Reserved. A geek trapped in a cool guy's body

The Missing .NET #7: Displaying Enums in WPF

The Missing .NET #6: Version Tolerant Serialization

Jason Kemp — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:27:23 +0000

In .NET 1.1, serialization (binary serialization, to be clear) is a bit hairy when you're successful enough to ship multiple versions of your product and you don't consider versioning until the first bug report about serialization problems. Changing the type, by either adding or removing fields, in .NET 1.1 causes previous versions of your type to lose their mind. The only way to deal with it was to implement ISerializable, which is fraught with problems, not the least of which is it makes you entirely responsible for serialization and deserialization of the whole type for ever and ever. When we found this out, this mass hysteria gripped us, so every serializable type had to implement ISerializable, even it were new to the next version, which is now a maintenance nightmare. We also got sloppy and applied the same boilerplate serialization code to every type. So we didn't handle it well, but you didn't really have a choice in .NET 1.1.

© 2008 Jason Kemp. All Rights Reserved. A geek trapped in a cool guy's body

The Missing .NET #6: Version Tolerant Serialization

The Missing .NET #5: Tracepoints

Jason Kemp — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:21:35 +0000

Lately, I've been debugging windowing code often. Windowing code is stuff like window sizing, resizing, painting, etc.; code that has something to do with drawing the window. Debugging that code used to be fairly arduous because anytime you stepped into your method, looked around, then started execution again, the windowing code would need to be re-run because you had Visual Studio focused and not your app; since you have a breakpoint in the windowing code, Visual Studio would break into your method which you probably didn't want this time because you were already there, so you hit F5 again to continue execution and start the cycle over.

The Missing .NET #4: Cue Banner in WPF (I mean, Watermark in WPF)

Jason Kemp — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:28:30 +0000

A regular reader would know I'm quite enamoured with the Cue Banner as UI tool. Once again, in WPF, Microsoft missed something fairly obvious for inclusion; and really easy to implement, as we'll see. We've been through 2 revs of WPF since its release, and the number of new controls or new features on old controls is disappointing. In case you missed it, .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta was released a few weeks ago. The grand total of new controls in WPF? One; admittedly, a useful one - a WebBrowser control.

© 2008 Jason Kemp. All Rights Reserved. A geek trapped in a cool guy's body

The Missing .NET #4: Cue Banner in WPF (I mean, Watermark in WPF)

The Missing .NET #3: An AutoComplete TextBox in WPF, Part 4 – WPF Flourishes

Jason Kemp — Thu, 15 May 2008 11:00:33 +0000

The .NET framework is huge, but not so huge that it does everything for everyone; there are things that they in Redmond miss or don’t do for whatever reason but is still generally applicable to many developers. So, dear reader, I present to you a new series of posts on stuff I find missing in [...]

© 2008 Jason Kemp. All Rights Reserved. A geek trapped in a cool guy's body

The Missing .NET #3: An AutoComplete TextBox in WPF, Part 4 – WPF Flourishes

The Missing .NET #3: An AutoComplete TextBox in WPF, Part 3 – Control Templates

Jason Kemp — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:00:57 +0000

The .NET framework is huge, but not so huge that it does everything for everyone; there are things that they in Redmond miss or don’t do for whatever reason but is still generally applicable to many developers. So, dear reader, I present to you a new series of posts on stuff I find missing in [...]

The Missing .NET #3: An AutoComplete TextBox in WPF, Part 2 – Making it reusable

Jason Kemp — Tue, 13 May 2008 11:00:01 +0000

The .NET framework is huge, but not so huge that it does everything for everyone; there are things that they in Redmond miss or don’t do for whatever reason but is still generally applicable to many developers. So, dear reader, I present to you a new series of posts on stuff I find missing in [...]

The Missing .NET #3: An AutoComplete TextBox in WPF, Part 1 – A rough first draft

Jason Kemp — Mon, 12 May 2008 11:00:56 +0000

The more I use WPF, the more I'm impressed and confounded by it. Impressed because it is really well-designed, thoughtful, and quite rich right out of the gate; I'm confounded by the things it's lacking. I realize they had to ship something sooner than later, but some of the things Microsoft left out seem pretty trivial to implement given what I know about WPF. One of these is an auto-completing TextBox (It was even late to the Windows forms party, but still...). The most famous example is the address ComboBox in the browser. Start typing to see that the computer remembers what you typed previously. Auto-complete is everywhere in the OS, and you can see it on the web in spots too, now: Compose a message in Facebook and you'll see your contact list drop down and filter out as you type.

The Missing .NET #2: Collection AddRange()

Jason Kemp — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:03:38 +0000

One of the sad, unfortunate truths about Windows Forms development is that you don't get to use it. That's right: LINQ, WCF, WPF, maybe even generics, iterators, and the awesomest Winforms control ever, ToolStrip. All of it may be off limits to you, dear WinForms developer, because real people don't know what the .NET framework is, and don't care that your app depends on it; nor are they willing to sit through a 24 MB download, apparently. That last one seems really weird to me, a broadband user for 8 years, but, the numbers don't lie: your users don't have the framework on their computers. Now, there is hope with Vista — if Microsoft could just advertise it better so everyone's perception of it isn't that it sucks balls; it has .NET 3.0 installed by default, but .NET 3.5? Still a separate download.