Emad's Blog

Visual studio Service Pack 1 has been released.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/support/vs2005sp1/default.aspx

You can find service pack for visual studio professional, Express and Team suite Editions.

working with my windows forms controls framework, I discoverd a very weird thing about numericUpDown controls.

In my framework, to make sure that all controls are “valid” according to certain criterias, I used a recursive method to get all the controls inside the form.

N.B. If you have a windows form holding 1 panels , each panel has 10 controls. If on the form object you use
this.controls.count , you will get ONE not 11. As the controls.count gets ONLY the controls in the first level and it is not recursive.

so back to the numericupdown control. I discovered that the numericupdown is a “composite” control. meaning it is a combination of a textbox and another control called updownbase.

Unlike textbox, combobox, radio buttons, etc. , the numericupdown is tricky in this part.
If you have a recursive function getting the controls in a form: for a numericupdown you will get TWO controls not just one.

So I think this control needs to be treated carefully in any case where you need to loop on the controls in a form.

According to Steve McConnell famous book “rapid Development” he stated that:

“Uncontrolled problem employees. Failure to deal with problem personnel also threatens development speed. This is a common problem and has been well-understood at least since Gerald Weinberg published Psychology of Computer Programming in 1971. Failure to take action to deal with a problem employee is the most common complaint that team members have about their leaders (Larson and LaFasto 1989). In Case Study 3-1, the team knew that Chip was a bad apple, but the team lead didn’t do anything about it. The result—redoing all of Chip’s work—was predictable.”

From my experience, i found that the problem is much more than that. It has a very bad phsycological effect on all team players. they feel all their hard work is washed away by this person(s).

I was looking for a way to read from MANY configuration Files rather than only one as provided by .NET framework(appName.exe.config). this is because i wanted to make a configuration file to set the Colors and fonts of the Forms, another to hold the system Messages and so on.

Looking in codeproject.com http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/AnyConfig.asp?df=100&forumid=29847&exp=0&select=706263 i found this great code about how to do this with ease.

This class extends System.Configuration.AppSettingsReader and works very simply: just give him the config file name and then read the element you want.

I have started making some unit tests to test some advanced combinations of Rules.

Showing this handy tool to the QA team made them quite excited.