Marc Charbonneau’s Blog

I’ve been using the ReportViewer .NET control recently for a project at work. I’m using a collection of data objects as a data source, and while the ReportViewer itself works great, the documentation doesn’t really go beyond putting things together in the Visual Studio designer. It’s actually just as easy to do the configuration in [...]

One neat feature in Visual Studio I came across today is auto-incrementing build numbers. You can use this to avoid having to configure or write an external tool or version control system just (although you should be using the latter anyway).
To enable it, just open AssemblyInfo.cs in your project, and change the AssemblyVersion setting to [...]

I took the afternoon off work today to attend the Windows Vista Developer Launch Event (free coffee and a copy of MS Office 2007, how could I miss it?). It was an interesting time; the MS technology evangelist gave a four hour talk about the new developer features of Vista and .NET 3.0, and also [...]

Microsoft released Windows PowerShell 1.0 a week or two ago, and I’ve heard a lot of positive things about it so far. The easiest way to describe PowerShell is to imagine a Unix command line shell, but with all kinds of design hints and functionality from the .NET programming language and Windows administration tools.
I was [...]

As an IT developer, the .NET 2.0 System.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping class is extremely useful. Many times I’ll need to see if a server is reachable, or whether something exists at an IP address before sending another network request (say, a WMI query) with a long timeout delay. Although the Ping class works great (and is much easier [...]

.NET 3.0 was released earlier this week, to very little fanfare. I haven’t done much to prepare for it, and from what I’ve read so far there’s not much reason to unless you’re already building applications for Vista. The Windows Presentation Framework looks neat, but not something I’d use at work, where I do nearly [...]

If your company runs on Exchange (and who doesn’t), there will come a day when you’ll need to gather or modify data from an external application or a web page you’re building. There are many tools for doing this, from expensive third-party libraries to dead technologies buried in MSDN. The method I found best was [...]

For a lot of programmers, no matter what language or technology you’re working with the hardest part of developing an application isn’t just writing code, but making the end result look nice as well. Those of us who prefer an IDE to Photoshop are pretty much reliant on what we can find on the internet, [...]

I started a new project at work this morning. It’s a client-server helpdesk application, that allows users to fill out a request form on our intranet site, which puts an entry in our database and notifies me and my boss at our desks via a system tray application. I know there’s a lot of free [...]