Jan-Cornelius Molnar / .NET

I'm proud to tell you that I just received a Award for Customer Excellence related to Visual Studio 2005!

IValueConverter moved from System.ComponentModel to System.Windows.Data PropertyGroupDescription moved from System.ComponentModel to System.Windows.Data Its new constructors allow you to write: Dim g As System.ComponentModel.PropertyGroupDescription g = New System.ComponentModel.PropertyGroupDescription() g.PropertyName = "Status" g.ValueConverter = conv like this: Dim g As System.Windows.Data.PropertyGroupDescription g = New System.Windows.Data.PropertyGroupDescription("Status", conv) ICollectionView properties were renamed Sort --> SortDescriptions GroupBy --> GroupDescriptions and much more ... Unfortunatelly MS released December CTP before I could complete this. So stay tuned to receive information about December CTP! ATM I'm downloading and Installing Vista December CTP WinFX December CTP WinFX December CTP SDK Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" Community Technology Preview - WinFX Development Tools

Today on my 18. birthday I got my driver license ;) Beside a huge amount of money I spent a lot of time to practice driving but this will be over now. Sure I will keep crusing around to get better but it won't be that often and time-intensive. I hope that my WPF knowledge will increase more now so that I can release JCQ Beta with Windows Vista Beta 2. But before this will happen, I have to give a large party to celebrate my success today ;)

Today my holidays began and although I won't be at home too often, I hope I can finish my first release of JCQ. Atm basic functionality is implemented and more is planed. Chatting, offline messagin, buddy list download, nickname request are working fine. I have little problems with my network component because everything runs in threads and synclocking list. Maybe I create a version relying on asynchron callback methods to decrease CPU load while sending/receiving data. Ui develops well. WPF is really powerfull and though easy to use - when you know which button you have to press ;) stay tuned

You defined following property in your Avalon Window's code: Public Class Window1   ...   Public Readonly Property Special As String    Return "Text"   End Property End Class Now you want to bind your property Special to a control: <TextBlock Text="{DataBinding Path=Special}" /> But your TextBlock will stay cleared :( You can bind your TextBlock using Source Code but I prefer an other solution: First: You can bind controls to element's properites.  e.g. <TextBlock Background="{DataBinding Path=Background, ElementName=stackpanel1}" />  This would bind a TextBlocks Background color to stackpanel1's background color. Second: This also works with an Avalon Window. When you assign a Name to the Window you can bind properties of controls to the Avalon Window's properties. eg: <Window Name="w1" ... > <TextBlock Text="{DataBinding ...

Always wanted to assign a specific EventHandler to all controls of one type? It's very easy now. Styles offer EventSetter allowing you to assign EventHandlers to a specific Control or a Type of controls. <Style TargetType="{x:Type Button}"> <EventSetter Event="MouseDoubleClick" Handler="DoSomething" /> </Style>

I just finished installing: Windows Vista September 05 CTP (Build 5219) WinFX + SDK September 05 CTP Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 WinFX Extensions September 05 CTP for VS 2005 Except VS 2005 Testing features, which are not working for me in Beta 2, everything works fine. But I hope that next Vista drops will support more recent VS 2005 drops because some time has gone since Beta 2 release. First of all I recognized that there is no more Avalon Navigation Application. You can only choose between Avalon Application and Avalon Web Application (runs in browser). But you can easily create an Avalon Application and set the StartUpUri Tag in MyApp.xaml to your Start Page to provide Avalon Navigation. Second thing to mention is that some namings and locations changed (Events, Classes, etc.) IValueConverter can now be found at System.ComponentModel System.Windows.Data.ObservableCollection can be found at System.Collections.ObjectModel TextBlock 's TextContent changed to Text Windows 's Tex...

Our new forum is up and running at vb-magazin.de ! We are using CommunityServer v1.1 for Forums and had little Problems with its FreeTextBox component. The newest version has IE7 support but its ToolBars are not configureable out of the box. But now we're using DanBartels's FreeTextBoxWrapper to configure our FreeTextBox toolboxes and Intensive CodeHighlighter to highlight VB, C#, ASP .NET and SQL Code. The readmes supplied with these components are very good and helped me a lot. To combine the highlighting functions of Intensive with Dan Bartels TextBoxWrapper I had to write my own Button Classes which derive from FreeTextBox.ToolBoxButton and deliver correct JavaScript calls.

I'm pleased to tell you, that I got it to sign on and chat with other clients. Avalon is great at displaying rich text and so implementing colors and smileys is very easy compared to my previous RichTextBox version. Avalon databinding is so amazing. You can define Converters for every type to make viewable items out of your dump data. I had some problems to attach such a Converter to a dynamically created ListBoxItem but I worked around by using the event when the item is created and added the Convert to the binding by code. I'll provide screenshots as soon as I get hello working on here ...

I know there are several ways to get Vista Beta 1 to boot after XP install. This is my solution: I simply replaced the ntldr and NTDETECT.COM that XP wrote to my C drive by the Vista ones. I was lucky that I used Vista for some hours before so it created the C:\build\filerepository folder. This folder contained the Vista files ;) You can easily find them using Windows Search (F3). Reboot, select "Windows Longhorn" from XP Boot Manager press ENTER and enjoy this great new OS.

Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly Avalon) Beta 1 is fully equipped with Video and Audio playback features. Great! But I had to play a while until I was able to play a simple Microsoft WMA file ... The releasenotes say there is a new Class named MediaElement . It didn’t work for me without adding it to a Avalon Page/Window so I forgot about creating all items by code an added the element to the window's XAML what worked fine. Maybe it has to be bound to a page? Xaml: VB: medPlayer.Source = New MediaTimeline(New System.Uri(path)) medPlayer.Source.CreateClock.Begin The file played and I was pleased. Then I wanted to implement some status display and recognized the MediaClock’s CurrentProgress Property. But somehow it didn’t change. I had to set the MediaTimeline’s Duration Property to MediaTimeline’s MediaDuration value first what worked great for some files but didn't for others. I'm a bit confuesd because sometimes the playback dies without reason and I have to resta...

Wow a few hours ago (totally unexpected) an UPS man delivered my new DELL Latitude D810 Notebook. - A dream comes true - First impression: Outstanding! The notebook is everything I ever wanted. The thing that impresses me most is its display (15,4" Widescreen 1650x1050) - better than everything I have seen before. It equiped with 1,73 GHz Pentium M, 1 GB DDR 2 RAM, 60 GB HD, DVD/CD-R device, Infra red, bluetooth, wirelesslan and an very powerfull ATI Mobility Radeon X600. The only thing I mentioned after playing a while is when pressing the CTRL Key you can hear a crack. But all other values are great, especially the battery. It lasted from 9 am to 10 pm. I didn't use the new system the whole time but in between were many installion steps. Actually I got Vista Beta 1 running without problems. All devices are working except Infrared but I think this is a general microsoft problem. They don't seem to be in love with this connection. I will install VS 2005 Team System Beta 2...

In .NET v1.1 I already tried to implement a List that tells the DataGrid that it was updated. I managed this through deriving a class from System.Collections.CollectionBase and overriding a bunch of Methods. The Problem was whenever I chaned a property of an item which was already added to this list nothing was updated. I had to implement Events and update the List on my own. Everything was connected and everytime I wanted to use the list for an other Item Type I had to write a lot lines of code. What a waste of time. Then a few days ago I took a look at Visual Studio 2005 Beta2 and discovered a Class named BindingList which will inform the databinding Control that itself is updated. Besides it is a generic list which makes that thing more type-safe. I bound the list to a DataGridView and added some items. To cause an update when a bound item's property is changed I had to implement System.ComponentModel.INotifyPropertyChanged Interface. This Interface delivers the PropertyChang...

Some months ago I was really angry about all Icq Clients on earth. I switched them daily but with every new version came new bugs and things didn't work as they should. My dream Icq Client should simply be able to transfer messages between users correctly, read offline messaging and provide Server Side Buddylist and profiles correctly. That's it. I tried to find a good API which can be used from .NET but the only thing I found was the Icq Mir. API which is COM, slow and sure not that what I want. So I decided to build my own Icq Api which is complety built up from the ground and communicates directly with the Icq server using the Tcp protocol. I had to gather many information about the protocol, server behaviour and much more, tested a lot of things and wasted hours of my free time. But actually I got it and was able to implement an API built up on .NET v2 Beta 2 using SOA and Contract First. Now I'm testing the whole bunch. I SignedIn correctly and received all buddies fro...