In order to have XP visual styles inside Visual Studio.NET you can simply add a manifest file to devenv.exe. Simply download the file manifest.zip and extract it into the directory where devenv.exe resides. For Visual.Studio.NET 2003 it's: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Common7\IDE

This will ensure that your forms designer uses the XP visual style (only if the FlatStyle of a control is set to System) and even custom-made addins are in XP style!

RazorToolbox is a set of utilities/tools in the form of addins, macros, components, etc. for Visual Studio.NET. In the initial release of RazorToolbox we have ComponentDropper.

In .NET you can easily build components (= also controls), but in order to use them on your designer surface you have to add them in the toolbox of Visual Studio.NET. But there are some problems. For example if you are writing an exe-application and added some components in the exe-project, you cannot add them to the toolbox, because the toolbox only accepts DLLs. Another issue is when you are developing a set of components in a control library, you will have to refresh the toolbox for each component you added in the library, it is not automatically refreshed and is time-consuming. Besides that there are some controls in .NET that are not displayed in the toolbox, for example the PropertyGrid.

ComponentDropper allows you to drop a component on the designer surface from a set of assemblies. For example if you are writing an exe-application and added a usercontrol named UserControl1 like the screennshot below:

Take the ComponentDropper from the toolbox and drag it over the form where you want to drop UserControl1. You get something like:

This list gives the set of components that reside in the current project and the assemblies that are referenced in the project. There you can double-click on UserControl1 and it's added to the form.

There are some settings, like you can first build the project before ComponentDropper search for components in the current project. Also you can indicate that ComponentDropper searches in the list of references in the current project. A list of references can be excluded through expressions, for example: System.*.

Download:RazorToolbox.zip (223,59 KB)

Any feedback and comments are greatly appreciated!

Now you don't need anymore the architect edition of Visio to generate your UML diagrams from an assembly. Now you can use Assembly2Visio from GotDotNet.

It has the extra feature that you can use regular expressions to filter class names and its totally integrated in Visio 2003 through a macro. Nice tool!

Today I published the first version of the library delarou.Browser. The aim of the library is to wrap the browser functionality of Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It acts like a normal windows control in your toolbox and you can easily drag and drop the controls IEBrowser and/or MozillaBrowser on your designer surface. More information about the library can be found here.

Below you find a screenshot of the demo application (top MSIE, bottom Mozilla):

This library is an initial version and will frequently be updated, because this is a part of a bigger project that I am working on, namely SharpBrowser (more details about that project will come soon). Note that the control IEBrowserHost is not yet intended for use, it’s still in development

In a distributed application I created a project (facade) where all business logic reside. I wrote a ConfigSettings class where all configuration settings reside, like for example the connectionstring. These settings are fetched from an XML file through the XMLSerializer from .NET. To enforce layer abstraction I changed the protection level of the ConfigSettings class to internal.

But when I try to deserialize the xml I get an InvalidOperationException! I was a little bit surprised that apparently the XMLSerializer can only (de)serialize public classes!!! After changing the protection level to public everything works fine, but there goes my abstraction (of course you can write your own implementation)

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This weekend I visited CeBIT 2004 at Hannover and as usual there was a lot to see. It was a trip of about 450 KM but we had no traffic problems, although there were a lot of road works. We slept in the hotel Montana Lauenau which was perfectly in order and was on the road to Hannover. Finding parking at CeBIT was far from easy, practically all parkings where full but we did find one for only 5 euro for the whole day!

One of the things I have seen a lot at CeBIT were usb-sticks (one seen of 1GB) and mp3 players in all kinds of formats and capacity. An original idea was Lubic where you can create your own PC case with components, like you do with Lego. It goes from an Airplane to a Giraffe, for example:

SOHOTANK Stackable External Box from the company Stardom was exacly what I was searching for. It has a very nice design and it's easily expandable. They offer also RAID solutions!

Today you see a lot of XAML-like implementations for .NET framework 1.1. XAML (pronounced "Zamel") is part of AVALON in Longhorn and it allows you to describe the layout of applications. Basically, you describe via XAML-tags your controls, events, etc. it's very intuitive.

One of the projects is wfml. You can find the article with the source code here.

Another project which is still in beta is xamlon. Closer to the release date Xamlon will be licensed per developer.

An implementation under the BSD License is MyXaml and it is increasingly successful. I think I will first play around with this implementation . An article from the author of MyXaml can be found on CodeProject

I think the developers who first implemented the concept were ic#code. They setup a library XmlForms which can be downloaded here and is used in SharpDevelop.

The ASP.NET Resource Kit is a nice bundle of tutorials, tools and free controls for any developer starting ASP.NET. It can be downloaded here (about 134MB). Go and get it!