blue collar

a blog by dan elliott.

A Few of My Favorite Things...in Visual Studio 2010

Since my last post I've switched from Visual Studio 2008/.Net 3.5 to VS 2010/.Net 4.0 for most of my...

Date: 03/05/2011

AssemblyFileVersionAttribute and AssemblyVersionAttribute: A subtle difference

The AssemblyInfo.cs file generated by Visual Studio contains the following lines: // Version...

Date: 01/11/2011

Visual Studio Tip of the Day

I want to give a quick shout-out to Sara Ford and Zain Naboulsi for their great Visual Studio tips....

Date: 11/30/2010

Poor Man's Guide Lines for Visual Studio's Windows Forms Editor

The custom control I've been working on required drawing custom shapes on each side of the control....

Date: 11/29/2010

Why does retrieving resources have to be so difficult? Oops, it's not...

Loading embedded resources at runtime has always mystified me. Should I use the...

Date: 10/31/2010

C# Extension Methods: Syntactic Sugar or Useful Tool?

Last week a colleague introduced me to extension methods (C#, VB) in .Net. If you're not familiar...

Date: 10/24/2010

Hiding a non-virtual property for a derived control at design-time

I've recently been developing a custom control (BarControl) that derived from an existing control...

Date: 10/23/2010

Back in Business

After a hiatus of 3+ years, I've decided to reopen blue collar. The focus will no longer be the .Net...

Date: 10/23/2010

Adding Compact Framework Design-Time Attributes, or More Fun With TextBoxes

A common user-interface feature is to select the contents of a text-box when the textbox gets focus....

Date: 02/08/2007

Setting Alignment in TextBoxes...No Looking Glass Required

In yesterday's post I stated that "non-character keys do not trigger KeyPress events." While that is...

Date: 02/07/2007

Setting Alignment in TextBoxes, or Through the Looking Glass

With a couple of exceptions, the UI controls provided by the .NET Compact Framework are thin...

Date: 02/06/2007

Using a hardware key to tab through controls

The question of using a hardware button to tab through the controls on a form came up on the Compact...

Date: 01/29/2007

A Trip Down Memory Lane

While waiting for Visual Studio to repair whatever was causing deploys to the emulator to fail, I...

Date: 11/29/2006

Who'da thunk it? #1

This is the first in an ongoing series on the non-obvious (to me, at least). This question is from...

Date: 10/12/2006

Compact Framework OpCode Support in a Nutshell

While the stated goal of this blog is to address issues that affect the day-to-day work of most...

Date: 09/26/2006

Extending .Net Compact Framework Controls

Hello, and welcome to blue collar. My name is Dan Elliott and I'm a software development engineer in...

Date: 09/07/2006