I recently saw a post in an MS newsgroup and as I had an example that I wrote earlier, I just thought I’d make it available. What this does is simple: it implements custom handling of the non-client area of a window. The non-client area is, normally, the area of a window that is not part of the client area (duh!), like that used for adornments, window buttons, borders, that kind of thing. While the user moves the mouse over a window’s area, Windows sends messages to figure out which part of the …

DDD 4 is over and as everybody has already blogged, it was a great success again (at least I haven’t seen anybody say anything else). The feedback form is up and if you were there, we’d really like you to fill it out — that way you can make sure it’s going to be even better next time! Another thing worth mentioning is the aggregation of DDD 4 related blog articles here — go have a look if you’re interested what others have to say. …

One of my sessions has been selected for DDD 4, that much I’ve known for a few weeks. Problem was, I thought I’d lost the original notification email in a server crash, so for a while I couldn’t be 100% sure what that session was, given that I had submitted several sessions to the voting. Talking to a number of people, I passed on what I was pretty sure was the correct information, that the session in question was titled “Object/Relational Mapping in real-world applications”. Turns out several …

A weird thing… I was working on a WCF sample program today and I was creating my ServiceHost instance from code, like this:

Uri baseAddress = new Uri("net.tcp://localhost:7465/");

singleton = new HelloWorldClassServerProxy(new HelloWorldClass());
ServiceHost serviceHost = new ServiceHost(singleton, baseAddress);

Binding binding = new NetTcpBinding( );
serviceHost.AddServiceEndpoint(typeof(IHelloWorldContract), binding, "HelloWorld");

serviceHost.Open( );

The code I was te …

Not normally something I post about these days, but Delphi is something I used to use a lot… what’s more, Developer Express as a company is obviously still very much involved in the Delphi market. So I found this article very interesting, which details a lot of the things you’ll want to know when targeting Vista from your (non-.NET) Delphi applications. Written by Nathanial Woolls, I should add — very good work!

In two previous posts (here and here) I have previously posted about how to draw rubber band selection rectangles similar to what Explorer does. Now a reader contacted me by email and asked for an extension: he wants to have a reverse selection, similar to this image:

No problem, of course :-)

I started out from the improved version of the first demo and made a few changes — all you have to do is replace the `SelectionPanel.OnP …

I had this test program that used a connection string to open a Jet format database. Worked just fine. I copied the connection string over to a more complex project, and all of a sudden I got an exception saying “Could not find installable ISAM”. Wow. Looking around, there’s lots of info about that message, some of it from Microsoft, like here and here. None of that seemed to have anything to do with my problem, though.

Know what it was? The connection string should have been this: `Provider=M …

I’m currently working on a project to do automatic Remoting publication of XPO services, and as this is supposed to run as a service, I wanted to put in trace messages. I hope every .NET programmer is aware of the nice tracing framework integrated in the .NET framework (if I caught you here, head here and work your way through the related topics). I wanted to use a TraceSwitch instance and log messages with various levels throughout my code — this was easily done. Then I stumbled upon a prob …