Not being an ASP guy from the get-go I needed some time to finish our first project here at A. D. Williams Engineering. ASP is way different (or way back as I think of it) from Winforms. But with the help of AJAX and the AJAX toolkit it’s getting there.

And having used it for a bit now I can see the beauty of the whole thing. I always liked the way you can present readable information with HTML. It generates really nice text flow that is so hard to recreate with Winforms. But getting some user input is a whole different story… More...

When I was starting to develop in VS.net I wanted that nice XP-Look for all of my programs. The problem is, that Visual Studio shipped without most of them. The most missed controls where the Taskbox/Taskbar control and the Grouped ListView Contol.
I ran into implementations of some of the controls on the internet (namely vbAccelerator and the TaskVision Sample on http://www.windowsforms.net) and into a document provided by Microsoft named "Windows XP Design Guidelines". This document provides detailed information on some of the new controls and I started to recreate some of these controls for VS.net (with hints and help from the sites mentioned above - thank you again!) More...

Synchronizing UI Elements

When designing common Windows Forms Application, it always turns out to be a bit of a hassle to synchronize different UI elements like a MenuItem and a Toolbar Item that execute (or should execute) the same code or should be activated and deactivated at the same time. More...

When I first played around with the new .net 2.0 controls, I was fascinated by the ToolStrip-Control and its endless possibilities to render it to your will by using the new Renderer property.

Having this kind of approach on any user-defined control would give the developer a powerful way of designing his application without forcing him to play around in the inner workings of the source. More...

To give your textboxes a distinctive look has always been a hassle. In the old VB6 days it was almost not possible. The only thing you could do, was to incorporate the textbox into a ActiveX-control and set the looks of the ActiveX-Control.

With the advent of VB.net there seem to be 3 distinctive ways to accomplish this task. With the XPTextbox-control I tried them all and will explain them shortly and point out the advantages and disadvantages. More...