Stupid .NET Tricks

Maybe I should write something on it once in a while. Really, a 5 year gap between posts is pretty sad.

Step 1: In the Regional Options control panel, change your language to Welsh.
Step 2: Use System.Data.OleDb and watch all hell break loose.

Definitely one of the weirdest bugs I've seen.

People often ask what the point of attributes is, and how they can be used effectively. I thought I'd talk a bit about one of the ways we use attributes in our apps, and as a bonus give you a few details on our boot process.

A bit of background
In our apps, all of the different components are divided into groups such as 'Shutters' and 'Services'....

(Yes, I know, this is supposed to be a .NET-focused journal. But I have to use Java for school, so I think it's ok to sneak in the occasional Java-related post.)

In my never-ending search for a decent Java IDE, I recently decided to install Borland's JBuilder 2005 Foundation. What a mistake that turned out to be. I simply can't comprehend how such shoddy...

I found this one yesterday. The bug description went something like this: "Start app. Press a key. App crashes."

D'oh! This one was caused by some weird interactions between our keyboard shortcut handler and our new localization code. Apparently some strings that weren't supposed to be localized were, which broke some of our accelerator actions....

(And how NOT to write performance-oriented apps for .NET)

I recently looked at writing some code to integrate with ACT! 2005. ACT! is a personal information management application along the same lines as MS Outlook or Lotus Notes. When I installed the demo and found that it was a .NET application, I was intrigued. When I found that there was an SDK...

Sometimes painfully slow. Changing from Debug to Release mode takes 30-40 seconds (that's just changing the setting in the IDE, not recompiling). I work with reasonably large solutions, but still ... it makes me want a faster computer. And don't get me started on how badly compiling bogs down the IDE, to the point where the output window can't even...

AxTools CodeSmart 2003 is a pretty cool VS.NET addin that we recently got a site license for at work. I haven't really had a chance to explore all of its features yet, but after a bit of playing it looks like it could be quite useful.

In other news, Outlook 2003 uses some undocumented MAPI properties for new contact fields such as 'IM Address'. Thank...