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September 23, 2004

Woodworking, Hardwood

Buying hardwood is done by the “board foot”. One board foot is a 12” x 12” x 1” volume of rough cut lumber.

Rough cut planks are dimensioned in “quarters” (of an inch). So 4/4 lumber (four quarters) is rough cut 1” thick.

So a 9 foot plank of 8/4 maple, 4” wide, is 6 board feet. (9 * 4/12 * 2)

 

September 17, 2004

Windows Forms user settings & save settings

These comments relate to Whidbey Beta 1.

Setting the SaveSettings property to true in the designer for a toolbar strip causes app.config to be rewritten with encoding Windows-1252 which seems to prevent the application from starting. You may see an error similar to the following:

Error while trying to run project: Unable to start debugging.

Unable to start program 'C:\yourprogram.exe'.

This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Editing the app.config file to change the encoding back to UTF-8 may fix your problem.

In general, using C#, the support for user configuration settings appears to be very brittle in Beta 1.

 

September 05, 2004

Experiences with Whidbey Beta 1

ClickOnce Deployment

Trying to install an application that requires FullTrust from the internet or non-local UNC is still either very difficult or impossible.

Found the following reference:

Also, the manifests you create are strong named signed and ClickOnce will block the install of strong named signed manifests that request full trust permissions (like the ones we're making here) over the internet in Beta 1. We're working on ways for small shops to use ClickOnce over the internet in Beta 2 but the best way to get things going in Beta 1 is to zip up the files and place that zip on the internet and your users can download the zip, unzip it, and install the app. You'll still get all the benefits of ClickOnce updates and app management. (from Sampy's Blog)

Intalling from a downloaded zip did not help with security blocking access to updates. They are detected, but the same installation denied dialog appears.

There may be a way to adjust security settings to permit installation of “publisher unknown” applications, but I haven’t found it yet and the reference above suggests there may be no way.

Generic Windows.Forms

The IDE’s Windows.Forms.Form designer can’t handle generic classes derived from Form. An “Unknown Error” screen appears. Temporarily hiding the generic aspects of the class and rebuilding the project allowed the designer to work again.

Changing the signature of a Form derived class appears to be tricky when using designer generated partial classes. Adding a “public” modifier is okay so long as the designer file doesn’t use “private”. The class name and generic-type parameters must be identical but modifiers must only not conflict. It appears that base classes and implemented interfaces also don’t need to be identical as long as they don’t conflict (i.e. two different base classes).