Creating Component with Rich Design Time Support

These 2 weeks had been most exhausted event for my brain. While researching designer class, I found something new and yet confusing methods to study. Design time component has a very wide scope to begin with, and it seems like one method can spread to another method. Sometimes I can be very frustrating. Once I got a small solution or step, that step always connects to another 2 or 3 problem that had to be solved. I wonder how much time I have to spend to complete my current home project. Luckily, my work had been on simulation stage, which mean, I have more spare time to observe and studying articles while doing a little design to my next project. Now I start wonder, since I have to put a lot of effort to my home project, maybe I should start to commercialize it? It maybe worth some money.

Adorners and Glyphs

Currently, I've studied a bit about Adorner. With Adorners and Glyph, you can give full design time support for making some good components, especially such as multi tab component. I'm telling you, learning this stuff is more complicated than I expected. The concept is difficult as well. Much more difficult for a man who only have one year experience with .NET Framework. Now I feel sorry for being ignorance when .NET released. Too late for that now.

After a few days of learning and observing various codes, I learn that to fully support design time component, I must include some service before applying adorner and glyph. Adorner itself are is part of behavior service. Luckily, those services come from base class, if you inherit designer class to a ControlDesigner class. Base on that base class, you may add an adorner which contains any glyph which will represent your child control (it's an array). One note if you work with this, make sure you override dispose method which is removing your glyph from adorner. If you forgot to do this, the glyph will likely stay even when you remove the component and closing the form. The possible solution that I found is to close your IDE, and start it over again (and of course, override its dispose method).

I know it's a bit confusing if you read this post, but hey, I'm confused too. I'll try to hang out with this for a while, and once I fully understand about the concept, I'll try to make a new component that utilizes Adorner and Glyphs. I'll post some article about making this component too. So keep your eyes open for another updates in this blog and my vbcorner tutorial blog.

Code Project Article

At least. My first article on Code Project has online. It took about 3 days since I send it. But it's not a big deal. I'd like to see how's my article rating within this month. After 1 year learning VB 2005, I've create many custom control. They only use for my personal purpose only. After I see several websites sold their control / components, I'm start to commercialize my work either. Maybe I should start to make my own component provider?

If you want to see what article that I've write, see here. Since you see it, don't forget to rate :P

VB Corner Tutorial Site

I've created a Visual Basic 2005 tutorial site. Check it here. With this site, I hope someone can find improvement with their skills in VB.

Enjoy.

An Analog Clock Component

During these days, I've attended some programming challenge in a forum. It's quite fun because that can horne my skills and of course show some showoff hehe ;D. It's also a great task to spend my weekend (because I'm still single and nothing to do. If I have a girlfriend, things will be different :D ).

TheClock, is my latest component that mimic clock sidebar on Vista. For now, it's still have one style (modern). At this time, it only has a standard features, but I've reserved some functions for future. Also I've engineered the class so I can insert a new feature easily in the future (If I have time of course te..he..).

Here's some screen shot:
http://www.geocities.com/mick_rawi/2.jpg
http://www.geocities.com/mick_rawi/3.jpg

You can download the code at: http://www.geocities.com/mick_rawi/TheClock.zip

That's for now. Sorry for lack documentation and explaination about this component, because I'm still not good in those two. But I'm learning for it okay ? Of course I know that presentation ability is one of most important things to make customer in the future.

Actually, I've created many more good stuff (at least for me), that I want to share with everyone. But, right now, I'm don't have enough time to do that. For meanwhile, enjoy "TheClock" :D

Gateway Switcher and .NET Deployment

Today I've created a new application called Gateway Switcher. It's basically a small program that change my internet gateway. The background for this program is that my company has operate 2 gateway for internet connection. When the first offline, the other will active. It's really annoying just to change connection all the time since my connection is very unstable.

Basically, Windows XP (don't test it on Vista), has stored connection data on the registry. So my application do a little trick to manipulate them. It's use a simple Win32 registry function to change this settings, yet it's a little difficult to learn how to use this function.

After this, I've planned on distributing this files through Marketing Division, which I think need this tools the most, since they are 2nd active internet user after my team :). I've learn some method of deployment in .NET, and I will use MSI installer for this distribution.