Easy control transparency isn’t exactly a hallmark of Windows Forms. If you have a form with a background image or a gradient, the stock controls paint with a solid background to give a criminally egregious aesthetic.

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There are lots of examples that demonstrate how to draw a rectangle with rounded corners using GDI+ in .NET. Converting such a rectangle to a Region so that it can be filled or be used for the geometry of a window can have less than perfect results, though.
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A question that arose in response to my previous post (about how string comparisons can produce unexpected results when done in a culture-sensitive way) was Which is right, StringComparison.Ordinal or StringComparison.InvariantCulture? The short answer: StringComparison.Ordinal.

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I got a defect from QA today saying that our product was unable to track files in paths containing Unicode characters. I’ll admit that I was skeptical. I had just tried that myself the other day and it worked perfectly. Trying it again today also worked perfectly, but the QA engineer showed me otherwise.

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I have a little backup program that I wrote that includes the ability to shut down the machine when a backup is complete. I wanted to add the option of putting the machine to sleep instead of shutting down, but it took me a while to figure out how to accomplish this.

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Getting a COM IStream instance on a normal file seems like something that should be trivial to do, but it always seems to take some hunting to remember how it is actually done. Read the rest of this entry »

At times it is useful to keep tabs on what is happening (or has happened) in the file system. This is a brief overview of all the ways I know of to track activity on a Windows file system. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve made some effort to understand the differences between the Struct Member Alignment compiler option /Zp, #pragma pack and __declspec(align()) with Microsoft Visual C++ in light of an odd bug that ultimately was caused by inconsistent packing options between compilation units. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been working on a context menu handler shell extension in C# lately. There are a few samples that people have produced on the web (for example, The Code Project, pek.com, and TheServerSide.net). I’ve found a better way of implementing IShellExtInit.Initialize than in the examples I’ve seen. Read the rest of this entry »