Didn't know you can register a global hotkey that the OS will call you when it's hit -- even if your app doesn't have the focus.

This is the poor man's way to do it instead of writing a system-level keyboard hook.

.Net2TheMax: Activate your application with global hotkeys

(Update)
At least in .NET v1.1, the BackColor property works for each TabPage, but the color only takes effect for the common area below the tabs. On my TabControl, I don't have any common area, so I can't see it.

Looking for a way to set the BackColor of the *page* part of the TabPage, where the text is. This is probably the part that can't be done.

----

That's lame - apparently System.Windows.Forms.TabControl does not support the BackColor property. Tried it on the control as a whole, then on each individual TabPage I was adding - no dice.

Google groups search confirms this.

Here's a 3rd party tab control that does support colored tab pages, among other controls.
Welcome to SpringSys

In WinForms, setup a global exception handler to catch the unhandled crap that slides through functions/call stacks that do not have exception handling.

.Net2TheMax: Global error handlers

Halo 2 countdown using code to calculate diff between dates. Didn't look at the code yet, but isn't the TimeSpan class used for that?

How Long Now?

Trying to find out how replication with IDENTITY columns would work. Here are some starting points:

Identity Crisis - SQL Server Professional article

190690 - INF: How to Set Up Replication on Tables with an Identity Column

Some dude has a decent walkthrough of datagrid, dataset, webforms programming.

Some things I haven't tried yet like paging, filtering, etc.

DataGrid

fxCop is a code analysis tool from the GotDotNet team.

Heard about it a while back, but never got around to using it. Hoping to run it on one of my projects here soon... hint... hint...

Bugslayer: Bad Code? FxCop to the Rescue -- MSDN Magazine, June 2004

Plug-in for VS.NET to count lines of source in a solution. Breaks down the counts by total, comments, blank lines, mixed.

Download here

(updated 7/12/04 -- see below)

Damn IDE wouldn't let me open a project from a local web url (http://localhost/foo).

Downloaded source for nGallery, but couldn't open the existing project.

Even went with intern Joe's idea of starting with an empty solution, then adding the existing, but...

-- if open as normal project, says "this is a web project, you must specify it using a URL"
-- if use URL, then get another dialog that shows a "share" for that directory, but no files.

Fix: enable DIRECTORY BROWSING on the virtual directory Wahoo!!

Thanks to this thread at google!

Google Groups: View Thread "help adding an existing ASP.NET project to a solution"

Update (7/12/04)

This MSDN KB article tells about another issue where the .webinfo file has an incorrect path.

Ran into this today, when trying to open a web project (via an MSI) that was built on another computer. The .webinfo file did not exist.

Hacked it by grabbing any existing .webinfo file, modify the name to match the project name, and the simple contents to point to the correct virtual directory on my dev machine.

keywords: vs.net visual studio .net open project url

Title says it all - what's new for web services in asp.net 2.0 beta 1.

Web Services Developer Center Home: New Features for Web Service Developers in Beta 1 of the .NET Framework 2.0

After playing with replication, and then wanting to stop it and drop the db, SQL Ent Mgr was complaining: can't delete database since it's currently being used as a distributor. (DB icon in the server list shows "shared" hand)

In the Ent Mgr GUI, right click replication, choose "disable publishing". Follow wizard.
(This did not work for me -- error: distribution database is in use)

Thanks to google groups for the following 3 SPs to do this manually:

sp_removedbreplication 'dbname'
exec sp_dboption 'dbname','published',false
exec sp_dboption 'dbname','merge publish',false

Now I could drop the DB (notice the "shared hand" is gone).

Google Groups: View Thread "Error 3724: Cannot Drop Database"

Data binding to collections with ITypedList. There is not a lot of docs on this, help is scarce. Here's a dude that wrote an article on the topic.

Intro mentions:
which properties to hide/show, custom attributes, ITypedList implementation of hierarchical data.

Really complex databinding: ITypedList with weakly typed collections

Bonus -- this guy's blog also has recent info about TechEd 2004

update 01/05/2005
Some discussions around multiple BindingContext objects on a given WinForms form, led me back to searching for this article, but not sure it was discussed here.
Minimally, I figured out what I needed:

If you have multiple controls bound to the same collection, by default, they will all have the same BindingContext. This means that when you change the value of one control (say, pick an item from a dropdown), it will change the data in the related controls.

If this is NOT what you want, you need a distinct BindingContext for each control for which you want to keep separate selections. Doing this is simple:
whateverControl.BindingContext = new BindingContext();

That's it! (Works in WinForms, wouldn't vouch for this idea in WebForms, since selection changes result in PostBack's, etc.)

other keywords: databinding BindingContext

Tree view control for asp.net. Says it's free, but haven't checked. Looks pretty good.

TreeView - ASP and ASP.NET

Another host to look at someday when mine runs out. Looks like they have the asp.net background instead of being unix/php with some limited asp.net support.

As of 7/1/04, it's $10/mo for 150 MB, 4 GB transfer, 50 emails.

MSN Access DB - bummer
Code behind support
VS.NET upload support - cool
Bunch of components

ASP.NET Web Hosting, ASP Website Hosting, Windows 2003 Server Webhosting, SQL Hosting, Access Database Hosting at DiscountASP.NET

Update 11/18/05
Another host $5 / month with asp.net

keywords: hosting web host