.NET

Recently I had occasion to write a moderately complex component that used "automation" (using the old fashioned COM term) to communicate with the Microsoft Office Excel application installed on the same computer. In this post I share several tips and tricks that may help you in your Excel automation adventures.

After learning that you really don't want to try using the DataGridView in unbound mode (just get your data into a DataTable and let binding do the heavy lifting--binding doesn't suck anymore!), I had to next learn that the DataGridView can be really, really slow after you get more than a trivial amount of data in it. Here are a few tips.

Some thoughts on Dan's .NET IsDate() and IsNumeric() post.

For some reason they left IsNumeric() and IsDate() functions out of .NET. I end up needing these is almost every non-trivial project. In this post I share C# and VB.NET versions of the functions I use. Your mileage may vary depending on your performance needs; if you're calling these thousands of times in a loop, then be sure to test them against alternate techniques. (Updated in light of new native IsNumeric() and IsDate() functions in VB.NET 2.0.)

I've found the BackgroundWorker to be very handy, but a little tricky to start using at first. I like that it has built-in support for reporting incremental progress for a long-running operation, and that it has a simple way of allowing a long-running operation to be canceled. And the big benefit, of course, is that your form remains responsive to the user and the operating system as it runs on the main UI thread. But there are some subtleties I had to overcome that are not covered in the documentation, especially in the area of exception handling.

I remain behind the curve when it comes from the latest from Redmond, specifically Vista and the ".NET Framework 3.0" (the latter being a choice of name I'm still not sure I understand). I have not even seen Vista in person yet, and I'm only just now having some real fun with "old fashioned" Windows Forms coding in C# 2005, and Windows XP works pretty damn well, so...

I found counter-intuitive that BinarySearch (Int32, Int32, T, Generic IComparer) does not always return first occurrence of item, if there are duplicates...

This does not bode well for Windows-oriented Open Source, and goes a long way to explain why even 5 years after the release of the framework, .NET-based Open Source has never taken off in a significant way. Projects like NDoc and Dot Net Nuke have been the exception, and now one wonders if independent, non-Microsoft-sponsored projects of any size can make it long term.

I recently finished my first "real" Windows Forms app in .NET 2.0, and when I finally got to a "complete" working version I was ready to do some cleanup and refactoring. So, I began combing through my code, reading for things I wasn't completely satisfied with. After correcting a few "magic numbers" type issues, it so happened that Brian came by my desk. Brian is a younger colleague here, really sharp guy, great attitude--one of the ones who "gets it". And he points out that I'm using "old school" Collection classes, when I could be using Generics.

It can hardly be said that any serious programmer has had to deal with database programming at least some time in their careers. So it would be logical then to make sure your code to these underlying databases are as efficient as possible. Hopefully I will share some of the best practices I have learned in dealing with ADO.Net programming.

I've been busy and I've been on vacation so it's been awhile between posts. But I found a cool doodad that just saved my bacon so I wanted to post a link to it.

D'oh, as my Eldest Yi Number One Son would say. I got a development laptop but delayed getting Visual Studio with MSDN because I need to better manage my finances, and I need neither toy for my six day week job as a LaoShih (teacher) in dear old Hong Kong. So I downloaded and installed Visual Basic Express. But then I asked myself, well why not get as another interim product, C Sharp Express?

Recently I worked on RBAC (Role based access control) implementation within .Net. A comprehensive work on this topic is done by Mark Strembeck XoRBAC Home. Details on RBAC concept can be found at NIST RBAC. While the design approach given in Strembeck's work was comprehensive enough to be realized on .Net, the default implementation (done on XoTcl) used extensive patterns from the language...

...The upshot was, about 2 hours later, I still had to destroy most of the rainforests of Laos and Ecuador to print the damn thing out. And as far as portability goes, have you tried carrying around half a ream of loose sheets of paper lately? Fun with binder clips.

I was surprised at how technically "unsafe" certain very common aspects of managed code use were under .NET Framework 1.0 and 1.1. Particularly, any kind of Interop activity in a multi-threaded environment has some potential resource leaks and even security holes.