ESMITHY.NET

Temporary CommandBar Customizations in Word

By Eric — Tue 04 September 2007 — 3 minute read

It's common for an Office add-in to put some custom menu items or toolbar buttons in the UI of the hosting application. The method to call to do this is CommandBars.Add. It is also typical that you'd like those customizations to appear so long as the add-in gets loaded …

Them Newfangled Cellphone Things

By Eric — Sat 01 September 2007 — 4 minute read

I have to admit to being a bit of a Luddite when it comes to cell phones. In spite of being in the generally gadget-friendly demographic of software engineers, and someone who bought the very first Palm Pilot model within days of its launch, I've not yet owned a cell …

Sleep Mode from .NET

By Eric — Wed 29 August 2007

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 …

Culture Shock

By Eric — Fri 20 July 2007 — 3 minute read

Over twenty years ago, I moved from Oregon to Utah to start going to school at BYU. As we were driving to Provo from the north, my mom, who had been born in Utah, commented, "This place right here is called the point of the mountain."

"That's stupid, there's nothing …

Office Open XML Deep Dive

By Eric — Thu 28 June 2007 — 2 minute read

Last week I went to San Francisco to take a dive off the deep end into the new XML file formats in Microsoft Office 2007. The training was hosted by MindJet, and presented by Doug Mahugh of Microsoft, and Chris Predeek, a consultant who put together the code samples for …

Finding Unmanaged Memory Leaks

By Eric — Mon 25 June 2007 — 5 minute read

At work we had a long-running .NET process whose memory usage seemed to be going up, but not coming down. In investigating, I learned a few things about leak hunting, and ultimately tracked down perhaps the most insidious leak I've ever seen.

My first approach was to try to profile …

Generating XML Serialization Assemblies

By Eric — Wed 13 June 2007 — 2 minute read

The .NET XML serialization support is pretty cool -- I've used it for a few projects now. It provides an easy way to convert objects with properties to and from XML. The implementation dynamically generates a serialization assembly to do this at runtime, so a recommended strategy for improving runtime performance …

ArgumentException Creating an XmlSerializer

By Eric — Sat 26 May 2007 — 2 minute read

I ran into a kind of baffling problem. I've got some .NET code that is also accessible to Java via JNI. There are unit tests for the .NET code that all pass. To test the Java to .NET connection, I wrote a few JUnit tests which worked fine when run …

Assembly Names

By Eric — Mon 07 May 2007 — 1 minute read

I always have a hard time keeping straight all the possible ways of getting an assembly's name and what form the various methods return. Here's a little program and its output for a reference.

class Program 
{ 
    static void Main(string[] args) 
    { 
        Assembly assembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); 
        Console.WriteLine("Assembly.ToString()           : {0 …

Getting an IStream on a File

By Eric — Sat 28 April 2007

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.

There is a function in the shell API that will return an IStream on a file: SHCreateStreamOnFile …