Dotnet

I have two hints today both of them involving changing accessibility modifiers. The first is a feature of CodeRush that I accidentally discovered while testing out the Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools the second is a great new feature of Visual Studio 2010. For those who don’t know what I mean by accessibility modifiers, those are the keywords you put before blocks of code that define how that code can be accessed, this is all enforced by the compiler giving you nice compiler error messages if you violate these rules. To provide an example the following auto-properties are all have the accessibility modifier “public”: ...

As programmers we are well known for writing bug free perfectly formed code first time round, as such I don’t really understand why DevExpress implemented the code issues feature… no wait… that should be the other way round. CodeRush has several ways to access the Code Issues user interface, first off there is the thin file overview down the right hand side of the viewport. In the code itself there are handy contextual hints too. In this example, this. is redundant and has been greyed out, if you hover over it it will tell you more about the issue and how to resolve it. ...

LINQPad is an awesome aide to .NET Developers. Written by Joseph Albahari of LinqBridge and the C# In a Nutshell series fame. LINQPad allows the developer to write, compile and run C# or VB.NET Expressions, Statements of Programs outside of Visual Studio. Everything I am going to show you in this post can be done with Visual Studio simply by wrapping the text in a new console application, and adding references to the DLLs. However I strongly encourage you to download LINQPad and give it a go. In the event you are using 64-bit windows and are still using LINQPad 2 you will need to download the x86 version of LINQPad 2, as all of the EVEMon assemblies are compiled for x86. If you have LINQPad 4 you don’t need to worry about. Assuming you have EVEMon installed, the first step is to load the EVEMon.Common.dll assembly into LINQPad: ...

I am writing this up to hopefully save someone else time in the future, this particular problem took up six hours of my day yesterday causing quite a bit of frustration for me, as the developer, and the users of the application. If you are searching for the solution scroll down to the bottom of the page where I will outline the solution I used to resolve the problem. It is also worth pointing out that this does appear to be fixed in .NET 4. Certainly I was able to consistently reproduce the problem with VS2008/.NET 3.5 on multiple different computers. However after converting the project to VS2010/.NET 5 I haven’t seen the issue. ...

AutoEllipsis is a property introduced to System.Windows.Forms.Label with .NET 3.0, which in the event of the text overflowing the rendering rectangle of the Label will trim the end and add a Ellipsis ("…"), if this does occur the ToolTip for the label will also be set to the full (untrimmed text). Unfortunately this functionality is not available for ToolStripStatusLabel. To make things worse in the event the text overflows it disappears completely. This bug, oversight, feature or whatever you want to call it cause some confusion after the release of EVEMon 1.3.0.1912. Several people assumed the new more verbose status bar was broken, being empty and all. We put together a kludge fix, which would set the text and if it overflowed try to guess the length with Graphics.MeasureString. This worked fairly well, it cause some flickering when resizing the window and would leave a small gap on the right hand side of the StatusStrip. I knew there must be a better way, and seeing an article about the StringFormat class reminded me of the need to find it. Searching about a bit found me a post on Joel on Software, I refined the code a little and came up with this (which is basically identical to Tom’s solution): ...

One of our more regular contributors to EVEMon posted on our forums showing that the application was incapable of updating cached files (specifically images), after a bit testing I discovered the following Exception was being thrown when trying to overwrite the file in question: System.IO.IOException: The process cannot access the file 'path\filename' because it is being used by another process. at System.IO.__Error.WinIOError(Int32 errorCode, String maybeFullPath) at System.IO.File.InternalCopy(String sourceFileName, String destFileName, Boolean overwrite) at System.IO.File.Copy(String sourceFileName, String destFileName, Boolean overwrite) at EVEMon.Common.FileHelper.OverwriteOrWarnTheUser(String srcFileName, String destFileName) in EVEMon.Common\FileHelper.cs:line 108 at EVEMon.Common.FileHelper.OverwriteOrWarnTheUser(String destFileName, Func\`2 writeContentFunc) in EVEMon.Common\FileHelper.cs:line 82 at EVEMon.Common.Controls.CharacterPortrait.SavePortraitToCache(Image newImage) in EVEMon.Common\Controls\CharacterPortrait.cs:line 248 After a bit of searching around I discovered a post on StackOverflow identifying that System.Drawing.Bitmap(string filename) would lock the filename until the Bitmap was disposed of. The post presented a solution but no code, A bit of further searching confirmed my expectation that Image.FromFile(string filename) was subject to the same locking behaviour: ...