I love ObjectListView. It’s a solid, well-written control, and what’s more, it plays nice with NHibernate. When you use NHibernate to lazy-load a long list of items, any non-lazy proxy fields will be loaded by NHibernate as the ObjectListView accesses them.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the TreeListView, also part of the ObjectListView package. This control does not like lazy-loaded fields, and will crash on a null pointer exception if you try to use them. Be warned.
NHibernate is an Object Relational Mapping library that can create a MySQL database for you from your code, using mapping information that you provide. As it does so, it will create foreign keys as necessary to reflect that data integrity that your code requires. However, MySQL only accepts foreign keys for its InnoDB table format. This means that any foreign keys that NHiberate creates are silently ignored. Your MySQL EER diagrams will not show any associations, since there aren’t any. Read more
WeiFen Luo’s DockPanelSuite is an open source window docking library for .NET Windows Forms. There are a lot of docking window solutions out there, but most are proprietary (and expensive), and DockPanelSuite is the only open source implementation I found that was decent. It suffers from one major problem though – lack of documentation.
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String formatting in C# is easy – the hard part is looking up what all the formatting specifiers do. This cheat sheet brings them all together. Read more
Continuing from the previous GMap.NET Tutorial – Maps, markers and polygons on this site, this article shows how you can show a route on your map. It is assumed that you know how to setup a GMap.NET project, and set your map to your desired location (if not, read through the other tutorial first).
The following is a tutorial for using the excellent GMap.NET control. This text will explain how to place a map control on a form, how to initialize it to show the coordinates you want, how to add markers to it, and how to add polygons.
Download the GMap.NET library here (the so-called “hot build” from 2013 – the latest stable release is from 2011 and had some problems for me).
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I had a project where I needed to draw a lot of UML diagrams, and decided on Visio for the drawing work. The diagrams had to be included in various project outputs, such as a design report and a project wiki. This would require exporting files from Visio to PNG format whenever a change was made to any diagram.
What I needed was a way to automate image export from Visio. Since all the diagram files live in a single folder, a script would go through that folder, find all VSD files, and export them to PNG.
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I ran into a problem with an Android application, where I needed to create multiple database tables. There’s a small catch to remember that may save you a headache.
A series of books that I loved to read when I was very young is “Euro-5″, written by Bert Benson. These are science fiction stories of a time when men were men, curse words were unknown (except for “By Jupiter!” and “Blimey!”), and basically nothing was known about the universe. The Euro-5 series is food for Trekkies. It was available in Dutch. I don’t think it was ever translated to English. If I had the time, it would be on my to-do list.
I use my own PHP-based CMS for almost all my web development. This is great, because since I know the code inside and out, I can make whatever the client wishes happen. It has a lot of nice, reusable features (plugins) that make development of a generic website pretty short. Still, all was not well because one of the things it didn’t support was URL rewriting. In this blog post, I’ll set out to describe how this is done, what pitfalls there are and how they can be avoided.
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