Monday, December 29, 2008

How to Expose the Events of a Custom Control in the Parent Form

Say you have a custom control which has a PictureBox.  And you drop this control on a form.  But you want to be able to Code the MouseDown, MouseMove, MouseUp and Paint event of the PictureBox control that is on your custom control, and you want to code those events in the Form, not the control  You still with me?  You also don't want to create another control that inherits from your custom control to do this.  How can you do this?

There are actually a number of ways to do this.  Below are three ways:

1.  The easiest way to do this is to just raise an event in the Custom Control and handle that event in the Form.
      Public Event LinkClicked(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)
       Private Sub LinkLabel1_LinkClicked(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.LinkLabelLinkClickedEventArgs) Handles LinkLabel1.LinkClicked
              RaiseEvent LinkClicked(sender, e)
       End Sub

2.  Another way is to have a PictureBox value in the form point to the PictureBox that is on the control.  And then address the Mouse events there.  You'll need a way to return the Control to you via a FindControl routine in your Custom Control

  Public Function FindControl(ByVal Name As String) As Control
    For Each c As Control In Me.Controls
      If c.Name.ToLower = Name.ToLower Then
        Return c
      End If
    Next
  End Function

Then in your Form you would do the following:

  WithEvents MyFullImage As PictureBox

And in your Form_Load event:
    MyFullImage = ImgEditor1.FindControl("FullImage") 'This is assuming the FullImage is the name of the Picturebox in your Control

And then you can do the following:
  Private Sub MyFullImage_MouseDown(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.MouseEventArgs) Handles MyFullImage.MouseDown

  End Sub


3.  Lastly you would still use the FindControl mentioned in method 2, but do the following

      'Add this to form_load
      Dim pctBox as PictureBox = MyUserControl1.FindControl("FullImage")
      AddHandler  pctBox.Click, AddressOf TestClick


      Private Sub TestClick(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs)
              MsgBox("Testing AddHandler Method")
          End Sub









Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Referenced DLL kept getting deleted in vb.net project

I had a VB.NET project which referenced a specific DLL that came from another source (I didn't have the code just the dll file).  I added the dll to my project by browsing to the dll.  The problem occurred when I tried to rebuild the project.  All of a sudden I got a reference not found, and when I went to the directory where the dll was located it was no longer there.  The solution was simple one.  When adding the dll, in the Reference Properties window, you need to specify the "Specific Version" field to "True" instead of the default which is "False".  By doing this you don't delete the dll.


Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Passing an array of Structures with an array to unmanaged code from VB.NET

I had an array of structures and in the structure was an array.  There were a couple of issues.  The first thing was that I couldn't initialize the array while defining the structure (still haven't figured this one out yet).  The second thing was that when I passed the array to unmanaged code byref and when the unmanaged dll returned I would get an error.

What ended up fixing my problem was that in my structure was a Boolean variable.  When I changed that Boolean to Integer then all of a sudden everything worked.

I'll post code samples shortly.


Wednesday, December 10, 2008

How to access SharePoint sites through Microsoft Outlook

http://searchexchange.techtarget.com/tip/0,,sid43_gci1318679,00.html

Stop the Windows Authentication in Firefox

Whenever I have to go to the know or to timecard or to a teamsite, I get this dialog box which prompts me to enter a username and password in firefox.  I don't get this in IE.   The fix in firefox is this:

 

1. Open Firefox

2. Navigate to the url about:config

3. Locate the following preference names and put as the value the comma separated values of the address roots.

network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris

network.negotiate-auth.delegation-uris

network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris

Your value should look something like this: localhost,companyname.org


Create Shortcuts or Hotkeys to quickly send mail to a recipent

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/the-geek-blog/create-shortcuts-or-hotkeys-to-quickly-send-mail-to-a-recipient/

Embed and Excel Worksheet into PowerPoint or Word 2007

http://blogs.howtogeek.com/mysticgeek/2008/11/23/embed-an-excel-worksheet-into-powerpoint-or-word-2007/