June 2010 Entries

On Friday July 23rd I’ll be in Winnipeg giving a one day seminar on the nuances of Brownfield Application Development and how to get the most out of it.  More about the day can be found here.  I recently did the seminar at the PrairieDevCon and it was a blast.  The day is filled chocka-block with content and ideas that pertain directly to Brownfield codebases and will work in Greenfield situations. Registration can be found here and until July 2nd the session is available at a discount.  Hope to see you there!

The way that we’re told to use Visual Studio is that we create a solution file and add into it one or more project files.  Each project file then gets filled with different development artefacts.  When you build inside of Visual Studio each project represents a compiled distributable file (exe, dll, etc).  Many people carry this practice over into their build scripts.  You might be one of them.  I’m here to tell you why you’re wrong to be doing this. Let’s say you’re starting a project.  You open Visual Studio, select File | New Project and get things rolling. ...

Recently I needed to create a custom WinForms label-like control that allowed for the text to be displayed in a rotated fashion.  Our needs were only for four rotation locations; 0 degrees (the default label position), 90, 180 and 270 degrees.  There were other complicating factors, but for this post we’ll only concentrate on this component of the control. To rotate text using the Graphics.DrawString method you only have to do a couple of things.  First you have to use the Graphics.TranslateTransform method, then the Graphics.RotateTransform method, and followed by the Graphics.DrawString.  Here’s what it looks like. using (var brush = new...

Friday past brought the end to the first incarnation of the PrairieDevCon in Regina.  The conference had a great buzz of people, interest, conversations and learning about it.  It really was a blast to be at it.  Thanks to everyone who attended in whatever capacity since it was you that made this event so much fun and productive to be at. Here are the materials from the sessions that I presented.  There isn’t anything for the panel discussion since it was all off the cuff.  If you weren’t there you didn’t get to add or absorb….sorry. Intro To...