Patrick Steele's .NET Blog

I've been playing around with writing a syntax highlighting plugin for Windows Live Writer Beta.  It allows me to paste some C#, VB.NET or XML code into a textbox and then uses the squishyWARE syntax highlighter to set HTML coloring.  Fun (and easy!).  Great for code samples.  Here's some output:

I was reviewing some code I had ported from VS2003 today.  The project was using visual inheritence in a windows forms enviroment.  At one point (back when it was in 2003) I had marked the class abstract since, well, it was abstract.  Unfortunately, I could no longer use the VS2003 forms designer to edit the form -- since the class was abstract, the IDE couldn't create an instance of it.  At that time, I just added some comments to the code that the class should not be instantiated directly and that it wasn't marked abstract simply because of the VS.NET 2003 IDE.

I've been spending some time today documenting my code.  I'm using .NET's built-in XML comments and an alpha build of nDoc 2.0 that supports .NET 2.0 assemlies.  So far, it's been going pretty smoothly (for an alpha).  It seems quite stable and I haven't run into any show stoppers.

Just found out about this at our user group meeting the other night:

The .NET 2.0 Forms Designer has an awesome new feature called Snaplines.  Snaplines show visual cues to help you line up controls on a form.  They make it very easy to conform to the Windows User Interface Guidelines.

I'm geeked about tonight's user group meeting.  We've got IDesign's Brian Noyes in town to talk about ClickOnce development and deployment.  Should be an awesome talk!  If you're in the southeast Michigan area tonight (Southfield, to be exact) stop on by.  More information on the GANG website.

In a follow-up to my last post, Eric Bachtal pointed out that I could use a class with only public constants to accomplish just about the same thing:

I'm using a library that accepts an integer as a parameter.  The value for the integer is really arbitrary -- it's a utility library and the consumers of the library decide what they want this integer value to represent.