Jan-Cornelius Molnar / .NET

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