James Steele

All things dotNet running through my veins

March 2004 - Posts

Color Coded Results in VS.NET Find Results Window

I would love to see color coded results in the Find Results windows. Something similar to the color coding in the code editor window. For example: If I do a search and I am not interested in pursuing results (listed in the Find Results window) that represent code lines that have been commented out, I cannot quickly distinguish the “active“ code lines from ones that have been commented out.

Anyone else have this on their wish list? Are there plans to incorporate such a feature? Any particular reason its not being done?

UgOttDotNet - Ottawa.Net User Group

I attended the UgOttDotNet (Ottawa.NET User Group) meeting last night. Topics discussed were ASP.NET Security and Longhorn. Adam Gallant was the guest speaker from Microsoft. Despite a hard drive failure while driving to Ottawa from Toronto, he managed to get Longhorn installed and did a good job at presenting a topic (ASP.NET security) which can get a little dry at times.

After we got through security, Adam gave us a nice teaser of some cool UI features in Longhorn. It was worth the wait. After a few ooo's and ahhhh's the presentation capped off with a draw for some cool prizes , some books, t's, xbox/pc games, bags, and the grand daddy of them all, Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect. Swwwwwweeeet!

My one minute of fame (I am still owed 14) came when Adam asked someone to describe what an Assembly was. Finally my MCSD .NET studying pays off and my willingness to put my dignity on the line in front of my peers gets me a copy of  “Age of Mythology”. Needless to say,  that set me up for a night of ribbing and ruthless sarcasm from my friends (I use the word friends loosely ;-).

After hearing all we cared to hear about ASP.NET Security, we headed out for a geek dinner at Giovanni's, where I had the last laugh in sticking one of my co-workers with the tab for a 97' Barolo.

Kudos to Ajja for their sponsorship of the event and their support for UgOttDotNet.

System.Diagnostics.EventLogTraceListener Not Inerhitable! Why?

I was starting to design a listener framework for an ASP.NET application.  I had a look at the three out of the box listener implementations provided by the .NET Framework.

EventLogTraceListener
TextWriterTraceListener
DefaultTraceListener

I decided I wanted to extend the EventLogTraceListener interface and add a few of my own interface methods and properties. At that point I made the decision I was going to use this class as a base class and derive my own sub class from it. To my surprise the EventLogTraceListener is marked as Not Inherhitable!

The TextWriterTraceListener and DefaultTraceListener are Inheritable? What gives with the EventLogTraceListener? Why can it not be used as a base class?

WinForms Inheritance

Markus Egger from CoDe Magazine talking about WinForms inheritance. Although I have not yet designed a WinForms application framework of any signifigance, you can bet when I do it will make use of custom inherited forms and a wack load of user controls.

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