Site Archives for March 2005


Moving code from VB 2003 to VB 2005... Accessing Shared members from Instances...

Posted on March 27th

Lately I've been luckily enough to be able to reuse several bits of code I've written in Visual Basic 2002 and 2003, namely code from a few of my earlier MSDN articles (Design Surface and the Control series). Since I was planning to make a few changes, I pulled these projects into Visual Basic 2005 […]

This didn't take long.... putting your Tivo shows onto a PSP...

Posted on March 27th

Brian and I were chatting (arguing actually) about the PSP the other day at lunch... I thought the idea of selling movies for the device, movies that you couldn't use in a DVD player at home, was crazy and Brian didn't. Brian's opinion is likely the more accurate one (it usually is), these PSP movie […]

Caterpillars.... yum...

Posted on March 26th

The theme at my son's preschool last week was Caterpillars, and it also happened to be his turn to bring the snack (the kids rotate through this task, bring snacks/juice for 16 people)... so my wife went all-out and baked these breadstick-larva creations... ... and these butterfly cookies. Recipe f […]

My latest MSDN magazine article is online...

Posted on March 24th

Remembering User Information in Visual Basic .NET

Pulling from MSDN... the code...

Posted on March 22nd

(see this post for an introduction to this topic...) […]

More on "pulling" MSDN content into my site...

Posted on March 21st

In my last post, I was talking about pulling my articles from MSDN into the chrome of my site. This type of system could be created using a frameset, but frames are evil, so that isn't the approach I […]

Playing around with pulling my articles into my own site's chrome...

Posted on March 19th

Check out my articles page, which is built from an RSS file by the way, and click on any of the "Coding 4 Fun" articles. You'll end up still in my site, […]

Wondering about support for VB6?

Posted on March 11th

If so, wonder no longer... Jay Roxe covers this in a post on his blog and so does Rob Copeland.

Some thoughts on "Classic VB"

Posted on March 10th

This topic has been in the 'news' lately (well, at least in the blogs) and I've been considering replying.... but it turns out I don't have to, because Dave Totzke has done it for me. I don't really agree with his comment that we've kept C++ alive because Office is written in it... it is actually be […]

Doing uploads with BITS

Posted on March 9th

I wrote a couple of articles on BITS in the past (creating a wrapper, then background copying, then digital grandma) but it was all about downloading files. Starting with BITS 1.5, you can also upload files... is that topic of interest to folks? Just FYI, you need web server support to make this wor […]

I need to implement an automated exception report system... it's about time!

Posted on March 8th

I use the Exception Handling Block from PAG, so exceptions anywhere in my application generate a nice (full of data) XML file for me to use after the fact to track down the problem... but that file gets written to the user's local machine... so I have to ask folks to send it to me via email. What I […]

Odd things are happening with my TV signal...

Posted on March 4th

I've recently unhooked my Tivo... I picked up a Media Center Extender (the HP one) and that was the final step to moving all of our television watching to MCE 2005. We love it and we record tons of shows. Extender works wonderfully, better than the XBox extender because there is no stupid DVD to put […]

Converting from an Integer to an IntPtr

Posted on March 3rd

A friend of mine at work just asked me this VB question, and it is an interesting one to me because it isn't as simple as it seems... […]

Sick, Sick, Sick

Posted on March 2nd

No idea what we've caught, but everyone in my family is sick.... and it has lasted for three days so far. Fever, shivering, sniffling, coughing, ugh... This was the first year that we all got flu shots and I'll tell you, we have never been sick so often :) […]

Still 2 to go for the flat screen :)

Posted on March 2nd

Sign-ups seem to have plateaued, I posted that I had 2 left for the free flat screen site on February 16th, and I'm still at the same point. What I do have though, is about 15 "yellows" which means a person signed up but never completed an offer... everyone starts out yellow before going to "green" […]