Since my last post I've switched from Visual Studio 2008/.Net 3.5 to VS 2010/.Net 4.0 for most of my day-to-day work. I haven't had time to explore them thoroughly, but there are a couple of things that I really like. The first is that optional parameters...

The AssemblyInfo.cs file generated by Visual Studio contains the following lines: // Version information for an assembly consists of the // following four values: // // Major Version // Minor Version // Build Number // Revision // // You can specify...

I want to give a quick shout-out to Sara Ford and Zain Naboulsi for their great Visual Studio tips. If you use VS in your day-to-day work, you owe it to yourself to browse these blogs: there's sure to be a thing or five that will save you time and effort...

The custom control I've been working on required drawing custom shapes on each side of the control. The shapes needed to be the same size and I was sure that one was a couple of pixels shorter than the other, but it was difficult to tell with the naked...

Loading embedded resources at runtime has always mystified me. Should I use the ComponentResourceManager class? Should I try to find the ResourceStream in the assembly? And what's the correct name to use to identify it? Is it simply the file name? Or...

Last week a colleague introduced me to extension methods ( C# , VB ) in .Net. If you're not familiar with extension methods, they were added in Visual Studio 2008 to provide a means for adding functionality to existing types without creating a new derived...

I've recently been developing a custom control ( BarControl ) that derived from an existing control ( FooControl ). There were two requirements related to the derived control's border style: The BorderStyle property should not be modified at runtime...

After a hiatus of 3+ years, I've decided to reopen blue collar. The focus will no longer be the .Net Compact Framework, but will still be aimed at providing information and solutions that will save time and effort for developers delivering solid code...

A common user-interface feature is to select the contents of a text-box when the textbox gets focus. The CF textbox control doesn't do this by default but it's not difficult to add with managed code. While I'm at it, I'll add a SelectTextOnFocus property...

In yesterday's post I stated that "non-character keys do not trigger KeyPress events." While that is perfectly true, I misunderstood what was meant by a non-character key. In the non-managed Win32 world, pressing a key generates a WM_KEYDOWN, one or more...

With a couple of exceptions, the UI controls provided by the .NET Compact Framework are thin wrappers around the controls provided by the operating system. Perhaps I'm too sanguine, but I expect the basic controls (button, check box, radio button, edit...

The question of using a hardware button to tab through the controls on a form came up on the Compact Framework forum. The answer, while simple, still had a couple of gotcha's, so I thought I'd give you the benefit of my experience. If you're not familiar...

While waiting for Visual Studio to repair whatever was causing deploys to the emulator to fail, I came across this post containing images of Windows boot screens over time. I know I'm giving my age away, but the only one I don't remember is the first...

This is the first in an ongoing series on the non-obvious (to me, at least). This question is from an internal mailing list. Should the following C# code compile? using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; namespace...

While the stated goal of this blog is to address issues that affect the day-to-day work of most developers, from time to time I'll publish something for the propeller-heads in the audience. This is one of those times. Introduction The instruction...

Hello, and welcome to blue collar . My name is Dan Elliott and I'm a software development engineer in the test organization for the .Net Compact Framework. In my nearly 14 years at Microsoft I've worked in a variety of roles in user education, testing...