Folks, thanks to all of you who read my posts, and special thanks for those of you who make it a part of your daily routine. I’m taking some time off for the holidays, but will be back Jan 3rd. Look forward to receiving your comments and seeing your ratings...

By default, when you build a Visual Studio 2005 project, you get two executables created, the “normal” one (your windows application) and then the one with vhost.exe appended to the end of your application name, e.g. WindowsApplication1.vhost.exe. ...

I came across a great post with same title by Narayana Vyas Kondreddi at http://vyaskn.tripod.com/differences_between_set_and_select.htm . Great info, very well presented. Below are some key points from the article: 1. SET is the ANSI standard way...

Did you know that Ctrl+Shift+N clears formatting of the selected text in Microsoft Word. No more mousing over to the Style drop-down, and scrolling to the Clear Formatting option… a quick key-press does it!

Have you ever created a delegate that has just a couple of lines of code? If yes, in .NET 2.0 you could’ve put that code right “in-line” as demonstrated below: class MyForm : Form { ListBox listBox; TextBox textBox; Button addButton; public MyForm...

Summary: Visual Studio has a new property for assembly references – Specific Version. When this property is set to True, Visual Studio 2005 will only build the client if it has access to the same version of the referenced assembly of when the reference...

Visual Studio 2005 makes it a mouse-click away… Just mouse over the DataSet variable in your code, wait for the IntelliSense tooltip to show up, and then expand it by clicking the little down arrow sign (not the + sign, which gives you functionality akin...

For those who are not familiar with the term, ObjectSpaces refers to a technology representing an abstraction layer between business objects (strong typed classes) and a relational database, which instantiates and populates custom objects from a relational...

Did you know that C# now has a new operator ?? ? It has to do with the support for nullable data types. A nullable type can contain a value, or it can be undefined. The ?? operator defines the default value to be returned when a nullable type is assigned...

Ever wished you had a freeware DropDownList control that, instead of having one hardcoded tool tip, changed the tool tip text as the user moves from item to item in the dropped down list? Well, your wait is over. I’m enclosing the code for such a control...

The NetworkChange class (new in .NET 2.0 framework) allows applications to receive notification when the Internet Protocol (IP) address of a network interface, also known as a network card or adapter, changes. An interface address can change for a variety...

Ok, so we all know that reflection (run time discovery and invocation), a concept somewhat akin to late binding from COM days, is slower than calling those methods and properties directly (early binding, to continue the analogy). But how much slower is...

In VS2005, you can test a user control using a tool called UserControl Test Container. If you have a control library project in VS, you can hit F5 and it will launch the Test Container. The Test Container allows you to select the control you want to...

Forward compatibility means that an application can be compiled and run on both later and earlier versions of the .NET Framework. Can your application, compiled using VS2005 (.NET 2.0) run without any problems on .NET 1.1? If yes, it’s forward compatible...