Channel 9 - Discussions by Sk4rlath

Tech Off - Vertical text looks really ugly

Sk4rlath — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 18:50:53 GMT

Sven Groot wrote:

I took the liberty of reporting this issue.

Why, thank you sir! I had completely forgotten about that.

Tech Off - Vertical text looks really ugly

Sk4rlath — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 17:55:04 GMT

I knew I should have posted this first. OTL

Now do you see what I mean by ugly?

Tech Off - Vertical text looks really ugly

Sk4rlath — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 16:15:21 GMT

Let me know if there's something I'm doing wrong here.

Turn on ClearType and open up C# Express and drop a ToolStrip on the side of a form. Add a button and set the following properties:

TextAlign = BottomCenter
TextDirection = Vertical90
TextImageRelation = ImageAboveText
ImageAlign = TopCenter

Look at the text on the button - it's ugly! It looks like all the extra ClearType pixels are all black making the font look really bold and aliased.

Is this a bug in GDI+, or do I have something not set right?

Coffeehouse - Hello Tablet world!

Sk4rlath — Sat, 16 Apr 2005 03:21:31 GMT

Oh, by the way: Whoever commented (I can't remember names), the reason your ink doesn't look as smooth is because Microsoft.Ink isn't picking up on your external tablet's pressure - it's treating it as mouse input.

Coffeehouse - Hello Tablet world!

Sk4rlath — Sat, 16 Apr 2005 03:05:37 GMT

I'm not getting a messagebox either.

If it helps any, I can see the control's bounding boxes with the 'loading applet' glyph in the corner for a split second before the ink enabled message comes up.

Coffeehouse - Hello Tablet world!

Sk4rlath — Sat, 16 Apr 2005 02:03:12 GMT

Charles wrote:

Hmm. I don't think that's a very reliable test. Basically, the CLR Loader is smart enough to load the right version based on what the compiled managed exe is built against. I really don't know why this is happening. I need to dig in more.

C

Well, that assembly was written in 2003, so that means it's built against 1.1, right?

Regardless, I hope the issue (either on my side or yours) gets resolved. Can't wait to show the world my terrible handwriting! =D

Coffeehouse - Hello Tablet world!

Sk4rlath — Sat, 16 Apr 2005 01:52:09 GMT

Charles wrote:

You added an Iexplore.exe.config file to your IE directory with this content:





?

You are correct sir, though mine is not as nicely indented. Both with and without the config I report loading 1.0. (by the way, I'm using http://www.cs.odu.edu/~asampson/code/test.html to test my version - just calling Assembly.GetAssembly(typeof(string)).ToString() and displaying it).

Coffeehouse - Hello Tablet world!

Sk4rlath — Sat, 16 Apr 2005 01:09:45 GMT

I wrote a UserControl in both 2002 and 2003 and hosted them in IE. Both report to use 1.0, even with the redirection iexpore.exe.config I copied from another post. So I am loading 1.0. How do I make it use 1.1 instead?

Coffeehouse - Hello Tablet world!

Sk4rlath — Sat, 16 Apr 2005 00:37:49 GMT

Okay:

.NET 1.0 and 1.1 installed, (2.0 is uninstalled and I've rebooted since)
IE 6
Tablet XP SP2
Not signed in on Passport
Experience Pack installed
SDK 1.7 installed
C9 trusted
gacutil /cdl has been run
EDIT: Running as a User, not an Administrator.

I can get to the Inking reply page, but it says I'm not ink enabled! Microsoft.Ink is in the GAC both 1.7 and 1.0.

Maybe add the exception info in a link called "Technical Details" so we can see what's going wrong?

Coffeehouse - Hello Tablet world!

Sk4rlath — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 18:47:05 GMT

Sorry about the repro info - couldn't think of anything else that wold have affected it, but you hit the nail on the head. I do have 2.0 installed because I wrote my Summer of Express entry on this tablet. Is there any way I can set up my machine.config to redirect everyone to 1.1 instead of defaulting to 2.0? This has also caused some ASP.NET problems for me and I was wondering if there was a solution that doesn't require me to un/reinstall Express every time I want to switch (that's a hassle, being a LUA and all). I wouldn't mind having to run something to switch back and forth, but the installation process is lengthy.

Coffeehouse - Hello Tablet world!

Sk4rlath — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 18:16:29 GMT

How's this for a bug - I click on ReplyInInk and it redirects me to the front page. Running Tablet XP SP2 with all the patches, C9 is a trusted site.

Coffeehouse - Longhorn on sale in WalMart! $9.86!!

Sk4rlath — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 20:38:57 GMT

Here's an exclusive photo of Longhorn on sale in WalMart:

Interesting new packaging, Microsoft. But how do I fit this toy into my CD drive?

Tech Off - On the topic of Object Immortality

Sk4rlath — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 04:57:03 GMT

Let's say I have the following class:

public class Immortal
{
private static System.Collections.ArrayList immortals = new System.Collections.ArrayList();

    public Immortal()
    {
    }

    ~Immortal()
    {
        // rise from your grave!
        immortals.Add(this);
        System.Gc.ReRegisterForFinalize(this);
    }
}

If I then do the following:

Immortal being = new Immortal();

being = null;

System.GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers();

Will the program hang waiting for an immortal object to die?

I know that the docs don't guarantee that WaitForPendingFinalizers will ever return, but I'm just curious if this will hang it.

Tech Off - Power Settings permission bit?

Sk4rlath — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 04:23:36 GMT

Yeah, I'm doing the whole Run As... thing for the rest of my admin stuff, but the Toshiba Power Console (I'm locked out of the regular Windows XP power options) won't let me do it through Run As. I need to have the power change bit in my user profile.

Tech Off - Cairo - What did I miss?

Sk4rlath — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 04:11:20 GMT

So I've heard this thing called "Cairo" mentioned a lot in Longhorn blogs and in other forward-facing Microsoft-related info. What exactly was Cairo? All I can find with a Google search amounts to little more than people saying "omg vaporware lol".

I've heard:

- object oriented file-system
- was originally slated to be NT 4, then 2000, then XP, and now Longhorn
- advanced UI

That's all I can find. I'm posting this in Techoff because I want technical details - what is Cairo from a tech perspective? What sort of scenarios did it enable? What happened to it?

Tech Off - Power Settings permission bit?

Sk4rlath — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 02:43:09 GMT

Does anyone know the bit to toggle to get my least privilege user account to be able to play with power settings? It's a real pain to have to log off/fast user switch to Administrator in order to switch my Tablet from fry-my-crotch-with-heat-and-power mode to slow-as-a-snail-but-not-on-fire mode.

I think Power User might do it, but I want to just add the power-changing permission so I'm still as least privilege as possible.

Coffeehouse - VS.NET Macro Speed

Sk4rlath — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 02:11:38 GMT

Maybe it's because I'm using an old version (2002), but macro execution time is really slow (about 1-2 seconds to delete some text, enter some text, and move the cursor). Is it any faster in 2003? Am I just on a really slow machine (hope not - this Tablet PC's only two years old!)

Tech Off - Can DLL use functions from main application?

Sk4rlath — Mon, 22 Nov 2004 18:55:47 GMT

From my experience, the way you let the DLL call the main app's functions is via callbacks and function pointers.

// DLL
void (*g_callback)();

void SetCallbackFoo(void (*callback)())
{
    g_callback = callback;
}

void DoSomething()
{
    // do stuff

    // call callback
    g_callback();
}

// Main
void SomeFunc()
{
    SetCallback(DLLCallback);
}

void DLLCallback()
{
    // do something
}

You can extend this sort of pattern to an object that you pass to the DLL or even a whole other DLL that the main program supplies. But for the most part I think these callbacks will get the job done.

Tech Off - Hotmail mangling forms & security

Sk4rlath — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 08:21:36 GMT

whitehorse wrote:

Additionally, Hotmail's HTML cleaner does not seem to like xhtml's "/" to close standalone tags??:
Example:
value="ecph-0213abf4d80501188e53c7079c8cf4a2" / target="_blank">

You mean

, right? I don't think you're allowed to stick things after the closing slash...

This may just be a webmail problem - I remember being able to comment from LJ emails using Outlook XP with my account. But this is what you mean by other non-web based solutions, isn't it?

Yeah, I admit VS.NET coloring the XML was a bit much, but I had nothing better to do and it looks pretty.

Tech Off - C# and XML - how to achieve this?

Sk4rlath — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 18:09:01 GMT

You know, I'm doing something similar myself. If you bug me enough, I might just zip up and post my XML-to-object graph code, though I make to guarantees about its security, performance, or bugs.

Given something like

It will give you what you expect. Just pass in an XmlNode and you get an object back.

To do the scripting bit, you can probably just make a set of scripting objects and have all the text parsing done there.

Tech Off - Version Number Calculation

Sk4rlath — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 00:28:46 GMT

So it's from the date and time of compile? Interesting.

Thanks!

Tech Off - Version Number Calculation

Sk4rlath — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 21:16:52 GMT

You know how when you set the version attribute on your assembly to something like 1.0.* VS.NET auto-increments the version number?

What's the algorithm to determine a revision versus a build?

Not at all life-critical - just curious.

Tech Off - .DLL MixUp

Sk4rlath — Sat, 30 Oct 2004 07:48:19 GMT

I do believe the thing you're looking for (Internal Name or Original Filename) is in the version resource. There is a program that can view it that is widely available: Explorer. Just open the property pages for the file (select and press Alt+Enter or right-click and choose Properties) and go to the Version tab.

Tech Off - Specified cast is not valid in asp.net/c# foreach loop

Sk4rlath — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 22:29:03 GMT

as tries to cast the object to the specified type and on failure it returns null.

Extra handy.

Tech Off - Specified cast is not valid in asp.net/c# foreach loop

Sk4rlath — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 20:16:33 GMT

You could always just change the foreach variable to something more generic and use as to check the type:

foreach (object o in pnlCheckboxes.Controls)
{
   CheckBox chk = o as CheckBox;

   if (chk == null)
      continue;

   if (chk.Checked)
   {
      // your code
   }
}