Darren Sim's Code Focus Blog

Great post on "Staffing in a recession"

2009-05-28T21:43:00Z

I was reading through the CIO Insight website and came across a really insightful article "Problems and Promise of Staffing in a Recession" which I think is something that's very nice for developers and managers alike to understand. =)

http://blogs.cioinsight.com/knowitall/content001/careers/problems_and_promise_of_staffing_in_a_recession.html?kc=CIOQUICKNL05282009MOD1

Book Review - ASP.NET 3.5 Ajax

2009-03-05T19:08:00Z

I've recently received a complimentary of the Professional ASP.NET 3.5 Ajax book by WROX authored by several big names in .NET Web Development, such as Bill Evjen, Matt Gibbs, Dan Wahlin and Dave Reed. Of this list, Matt's from the team that developed the technology itself.

I was very surprised to find this book so well written for all levels of readers, with a very good description of AJAX history and concepts as well as more indepth topics. Certainly a great book to add onto your book shelve if you want to get up to speed with ASP.NET Ajax fast.

Mind Reading or Mind Boggling

2008-12-13T03:21:00Z

Japanese researchers have developed a what I call a MIND BOGGLING technology of reading a human's mind, which can be transcribed into images. Basically, what they did was to take an image of brain activity taken in a functional MRI scanner, re-creating a monotone image from scratch.

This technology would be great if put into good use and could spell disaster should it be fall into evil hands. Military covert operative might have to be re-trained all together on enemy captures and etc. However, if put into good use, this technology could also help us uncover our true innerselves through the dreams we make, or allowing the physically and/or visually impaired to be better understood.

More about this could be read at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16267-mindreading-software-could-record-your-dreams.html

Composite Application Guidance (CAG) for WPF (aka. Prism) Released

2008-07-05T07:07:00Z

Microsoft's P&P team has just release a new Guidance for WPF, formerly known as “Prism” and CAG for WPF June 2008 was just released. It may help you adopting WPF and revitalize your experience with WPF.

The Composite Application Guidance for WPF is designed to help you more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) client applications. This guidance will help you design and build flexible composite WPF client applications—composite applications use loosely coupled, independently evolvable pieces that work together in the overall application.

Using the guidance streamlines the WPF team development experience. You can build solutions that take advantage of the full power of WPF and that are highly maintainable, testable, and whose pieces can be developed by separate teams.

Composite WPF on Codeplex: http://www.codeplex.com/CompositeWPF/
Composite WPF on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc707819.aspx

Creating an Outlook Message File with C#

2008-06-28T23:38:00Z

I've been working with a government agency lately, and came to notice that the software system they're using dates back to the stone ages. Many a time, the head of department is required to send an email to other head of departments within the same organization, each with a similar content, yet with attachment of nominal roll of folks under each of the departments (PS: HR Stuff).

On every occasion that I observe, this poor balding guy has to create a template in outlook and copy it 20 times, adding the list of recipients to the individual MSG file and attaching the relevant set of excel/word document file for each of these departments.

Of course, as a software engineer, the first thing on the mind is definitely, "AUTOMATION"!

Microsoft Office Outlook does have an interop dll which specifically allows for this to be done, easily! Another altanative would definitely be making use of Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO).

To save you the trouble of looking for this DLL, i've attached a copy to this blogpost.

1. To begin, let's first create a C# Winforms Project in Visual Studio.

2. Next, let's add the reference to the interop DLL (attached on this blog post). You should see something like the following.

3. For the purpose of this tutorial, we'd create a simple windows form which takes in the mail receipient, subject, message and attachment fields. Once you're familiar with how the code (which we'd discuss later), you can work more magic around this (e.g. creating automation processes)

Note: The Importance ComboBox should have the following values "High","Normal" and 'Low".

4. Next step, is to wire up the code-behind for the Save Button. It's optional whether you want to register the Outlook Interop in the namespace or not. In this example, I do not so so, thus qualifying the full path in the code (below).

// Creates a new Outlook Application Instance
Outlook.Application objOutlook = new Outlook.Application();

// Creating a new Outlook Message from the Outlook Application Instance
Outlook.MailItem mic = (Outlook.MailItem)(objOutlook.CreateItem(Outlook.OlItemType.olMailItem));

// Assigns the "TO", "CC" and "BCC" Fields
mic.To = toTextBox.Text;
mic.CC = ccTextBox.Text;
mic.BCC = bccTextBox.Text;

// Assigns the Subject Field
mic.Subject = subjectTextBox.Text;

// Switch the Importance ComboBox to identify the Mail Message Importance Level
switch (importanceComboBox.SelectedItem.ToString())
{
        case "High":
                mic.Importance = Outlook.OlImportance.olImportanceHigh;
                break;         case "Normal":
                mic.Importance = Outlook.OlImportance.olImportanceNormal;
                break;

        case "Low":
                mic.Importance = Outlook.OlImportance.olImportanceLow;
                break;
}

// Define the Mail Message Body. In this example, you can add in HTML content to the mail message body
mic.HTMLBody = messageTextBox.Text;

// Adds Attachment to the Mail Message.
// Note: You could add more than one attachment to the mail message.
// All you need to do is to declare this relative to the number of attachments you have.
mic.Attachments.Add(attachmentOneTextBox.Text,Outlook.OlAttachmentType.olByValue,1,"Attachment Name");

// Save the message to C:\demo.msg. Alternatively you can create a SaveFileDialog to
// allow users to choose where to save the file
mic.SaveAs(@"C:\demo.msg", Outlook.OlSaveAsType.olMSG);

Easy isn't it? Besides creating mail messages, you can also create other outlook items such as task, calendar objects and more. More to come in the future posts. Do let me know your comments/views on this post.

Attachments:

Tutorial in PDF Format (http://darrensim.com/files/folders/presentations/entry9679.aspx)

Interop.Outlook (http://darrensim.com/files/folders/presentations/entry9680.aspx)