.Net 4.0

Is there going to be a support for Microsoft Surface programming in .Net Framework 4.0? If someone knows I would be glad to hear the answer.. :)

Cool games made with XNA

I was just wandering around the net and found a few interesting games made with XNA. While we are waiting for a stable release of XNA 3.0 there's time to take a look at some cool things people have made with the earlier versions.

http://hamboeck.blogspot.com/2008/03/xna-car-cup-article-for-dndj-part1.html

http://skasoftware.wordpress.com/page/3/ (The Dishwasher: Dead Ninja)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY9Ufm5zXeY (Racketball game. Screenshot below)

And at the end, a little video showing off the game made with XNA 3.0:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8KU1TXT66U

Check back tommorow for more interesting posts about .net world!

Timo Salomäki

Textbox with custom border

People always ask how to create a TextBox with a custom border in C#. Unfortunately you can't achieve the goal by overriding the Paint() or PaintBackground() events. TextBox is one of those controls whose drawing is handled by Windows so for example Paint() event is never fired.

We can tweak around this problem by creating a custom control which holds a TextBox control inside it. The textbox's Borderstyle must be set to none. Now we can draw the border in custom controls Paint() event.

Remember! Textbox has to be placed like this:

Location: (1,1)
Size: (textBox.Width - 2, textBox.Height - 2)

Now you just have to draw a rectangle around the textbox area:

graphics.DrawRectangle(borderPen, new Rectangle(0, 0, this.Width - 1, this.Height - 1));

Screenshot from Visual Studio 2010 Team System

Visual Studio 2010

Microsoft has announced the future version of Visual Studio development environment. There will be key innovations in the following pillars:

• Democratizing Application Lifecycle Management
• Enabling emerging trends
• Inspiring developer delight
• Riding the next generation platform wave
• Breakthrough Departmental Applications

If you want to learn more about Visual Studio 2010 Team System, please take a look at the following videos at Channel9:

http://channel9.msdn.com/visualstudio/

Shopping - Windows Vista Home Premium Student

Yesterday I finally got bored on my Windows XP Professional (and the problems I had with it) and went to a local computer shop. My purpose was to buy a copy of Windows Vista Home Premium Student (Upgrade), but there was a surprise waiting for me... First I was just roaming between the shelves searching for a nice little box (that one where Vista is packaged inside) but only I could find was a Windows Vista Ultimate box. Its price was 300€ and compared to the one I was going to buy (104€) it was a little bit too much for me. So after all I had to ask the busy salesman if they happen to have any copies of Home Premium Student in their stock. There wasn't. I asked if there is one in some other shop near to my town (There's at least five of them (and a dozen not so far away...)) but they had none. I was amazed and decided to order one. I was thinking that it would take three to four days for my OS to ship, but they said that it will take at least one week! Now I'm waiting for my OS and I can hardly work on my machine with the older version of Windows (There's many explanations to that but they're not important). Of course I could reinstall Windows, but it would take hours to reinstall all the drivers and other important stuff. I just have not enough time. And yes I live in Finland, it really shouldn't take that long for a product like that to ship...

Warning for component developers

It's announced that the Ribbon control is going to be an important part of the form in the forthcoming release of Windows OS (Windows 7). It means that there's no more need for a 3rd party Ribbon control. I bet that the most advanced packages will remain used by developers (because of the other controls and features they contain), but those who provide plain Ribbon control, won't survive so easily without making changes to their product. This is just guessing but it's based on widely known facts. In the near future component developers will definitely need some ordinary ideas to stay in the business.

Exception! There might be a need for Ribbon control in Mac, when the .net Framework works in it.