In a previous article, I showed how nullable types, as implemented in version 2 of the .NET framework, can be persisted using XPO. But what if .NET 2.0 is not yet an option? .NET 1.1 doesn’t have support for nullable types and there’s no such feature in XPO, either. If somebody comes from the database world, it’s certainly understandable that types that can also be null are something he’s accustomed to. On the other hand, XPO is about persisting objects, and in that world, no ordinary value t …
In this post I showed how nullable types can be simulated in .NET 1, especially for use with XPO. Prompted by Miha Markic, I had a look at the possibility of data binding with those simulated nullable types. I found that while the implementation I had suggested could be used without problems in a read-only situation, it obviously didn’t contain any logic that would enable editing the types via data-bound controls. Nevertheless, this is easy to do by creating a custom TypeConverter. Like this: …
Chris Sano has made a fix for his ColorPicker.NET available, a tool I wrote about earlier. This update fixes the problems related to multi-monitor setups, where the mouse pointer wouldn’t want to leave the primary screen after dragging the mouse in the color area. His announcement of the fix is here.
The current version of Developer Express XPO has a Session object that handles one connection to the database together with an object cache for that session. Technically, the Session is a pivotal point in the XPO architecture, all object handling requests go through a Session object. Recently it came to my attention that some people regard it as a great problem that the Session object is tightly bound to a database connection. By default, this is a direct association: you can create more than o …
I have received several e-mails asking me about the real use of Generics. Why I like them so much and what makes them such an interesting feature in .NET 2.0. Programmers who use one of many other languages may not have had contact with anything similar to Generics, so I guess that’s quite a legitimate question. Generics are one of the features of the next version of the CLR (Common language runtime), as delivered by Microsoft with .NET 2.0. They can currently be used in the beta and CTP releas… …
An interesting article by Martin Parry: Extend the Common Dialog Boxes Using Windows Forms 1.x
In a comment about my post Simulating object properties with ITypedList and custom PropertyDescriptors, John Eyles mentioned the fact that the TypeDescriptor.GetProperties method doesn’t return the type’s properties in any fixed order. Therefore, when my own ITypedList implementation takes at least parts of its properties from a standard set that was fetched via the TypeDescriptor, additional steps have to be taken if the properties are supposed to appear in a particular order, like in a …
As I mentioned in a previous post, Copernic Desktop Search 1.5 beta is currently available to the public. One of the most important new features was for me the introduction of an extensibility API. When I wrote that first announcement, I hadn’t had a close look at the API. By now I’ve found out that it’s about extracting data from new file types, nothing more or less than that. I’d wish, and maybe I should add that to my list of things I’d like to see in CDS, they would extend that extensibilit …