Patrick Steele's .NET Blog

Someone emailed me with a request for sample code from my second COM Interop Exposed article on 15seconds.com. Since they didn't leave an email address where I could send them the ZIP file, I just decided to post it here:

Thanks Nils! I was having problems with a MasterPage layout and could not figure out what was going on. VS.NET kept telling me "Could not match '...' with any ContentPlaceHolder". Despite the fact that there was indeed a ContentPlaceHolder with the proper ID. I gave up and Googled. Although blogger Nils Gruson has but one blog post, it was exactly what I was looking for!

About two years ago, I blogged about that stupid (IMHO) setting for VS.NET 2003 that would hide "advanced" members from intellisense in VB.NET. In VS.NET 2005, this option is not only off by default, but the checkbox is disabled. Nice.

My latest article on COM Interop is up at 15seconds.com. COM Interop Exposed - Part 2 shows what you need to do in your .NET objects so that your events are exposed to your COM clients. I start with a history of how events work in COM, and then show how to use interfaces and attributes for easier integration with your existing COM clients.

Last night's talk on Webserver controls by Miguel Castro at GANG was awesome. I've read and enjoyed his articles in CODE magazine, but if you have the chance to see him give a talk you really should take it. He's a great presenter and kept the audience involved during the whole presentation. Thanks Miguel!

My talk at the Ann Arbor Dot Net Developers group went well last week. And there's more stuff happening this week.

I'll be doing an introductory presentation on NUnit at tonight's Ann Arbor Dot Net Developers group. After my presentation, Dave Donaldson will be discussing ways to write quality software with free tools (NUnit, NCover, FxCop) and how to write quality software with VSTS Developer Edition. If you're in Ann Arbor tonight, come check it out.

So yesterday was my first day as a contractor. Well, actually, it was my first day as an unemployed individual. The contract I was supposed to start on has gotten stalled in some "red-tape" and its uncertain whether this will be solved to everyone's satisfaction. Scary, to be sure. But this is one of the possibilities I planned for when deciding to go independent. Many W2 employees have a false sense of "security" when it comes to their jobs. You should always plan for the possibility of being out of work tomorrow!