Code, coke and coins

I was recently musing over the use of ASP.NET’s viewstate, and had a quick truddle around the web to find something that explained the in and outs of it. I feel compelled to link to this article which I believe is one of the most throughout and better written articles I’ve seen in a long [...]

I recently wrote about creating early bound COM objects in .NET, the object (no pun intended) of the exercise was to persuade Visual Studio 2005 to produce an early binable COM object without any ‘jiggery pokery’ after the standard build. The exercise proved successful, I could simply ‘build’ and start using my COM object from [...]

Many will ask why do such a daft thing as creating COM objects in .NET? Well the answer is fairly simple, at my current place of work we only have Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and I needed to create a COM object for compatibility with an older application, which only understood early bound COM. The [...]

My last 2 jobs have involved a large amount of Visual Basic 6 development (amongst T_SQL, C and various script languages), but have been very different in terms of design and implementation of code.
Prior to my current role, the VB6 code was about as cutting-edge as you can get with an 8 year old development [...]

Recently I finally took the plunge and installed the express editions of Visual Studio 2005 on one of my machines. The whole process was very painless I must say, the whole process of installing VC, VCS, VB and SQL 2005 didn’t require a single reboot, and didn’t present any installation options at all. It’s worth [...]

I’ve finally taken the plunge into the wonderful world of Microsoft Certification, having signed up for an horrendously expensive course for MCAD (Microsoft Certified Application Developer), and hopefully extend this to an MCSD at a later date. I had considered the books & exams only route, but it’s very tedious just sifting through a book, [...]

I’ve recently been steered towards a wonderful website called The Daily WTF which is maintained by Alex Papadimoulis. The site contains some of the most hilarious code you are ever likely to read, a lot of which is accredited with being source from ‘Enterprise level’ commercial packages.
It really is a site that every programmer should [...]

I was posed an interesting problem today, a colleague was debugging some Visual Basic 6 code, and coming across the following error:-
“Run-time error ‘3001′: The application is using arguments that are of the wrong type, are out of acceptable range, or are in conflict with one another.”
The error was occuring when assigning the ‘ActivateConnection’ property:-

Public [...]

I remember all too well wrestling with all sorts of versions of system DLLs under Win3.1. Even resorting to dynamic loads and ‘GetProcAddress’ to determine exactly what my program might be about to do. I thought it was all in the past…..
I’ve been beavering away with a smallish development team developing a new product which, [...]

Every now and again some bright spark comes up with a simple idea that really does rock.
Like many people I’m sure, I work on Windows 99% of the time. However much you want to knock Microsoft, it really is still the platform of choice for most purposes. In my case, I’ve little choice anyway, it [...]