Wednesday, August 10, 2011

WebMatrix is Powered by People

So much of today reminds me of the movie Solent Green (I bet you thought I was going to say the Matrix). Well Microsoft giving away web development tools is something new. In the past Front Page was a easy and expensive way to get started. We now see web development integrated into many Microsoft products such as Office. Publisher is pretty nice to work with and quite powerful. They have a host of different tools for web develpment which for most people not earning a living from it, the prices are out of range of most budgets.

This can lead people to free open source products where they develop first an affection for then later a dependence on these open source tools.

http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/?WT.mc_id=MSCOM_EN_US_DLC_CONFIRMATION_121LMUS007468

WebMatrix Features Hero
WebMatrix is a free and gives you a web server, a database, and programming frameworks. WebMatrix lets you use both ASP.NET and PHP applications side by side.

WebMatrix includes four integrated workspaces that help you focus on different areas of your Web site. Monitor real-time web requests and configure your Web site server settings with the Site workspace. Manage your files and edit your code using the code editor with syntax highlighting in the Files workspace. Add and manage databases using the Database workspace. And last but not least, generate SEO reports and optimize your web site for search engines using tools in the Reports workspace.

Nex time someone asks me how to get started I'm going to point them to WebMatrix









Tuesday, August 9, 2011

How to Make a directory list from your hard drive

I have a hard drive dock where I can swap in or out different WD Green Sata drives. Mostly 2 Terabyte drives. This have my movie collection. I need a way t keep track of what movies are on what drive. This is easy with some old fashion DOS.

dir e: /b/p > Movie1.txt

e: is where the movies are

movie1.txt indicates the movie disk 1 directory being written to movie1.txt

run cmd

paste in the first line of this email, then enter

So there is a separate text file for each movie drive showing the directory names that tell me what is contained on each drive.



Sunday, August 7, 2011

vb.net bring form to the front

Question How to bring an already running application in front


Focus On Another Application

set the focus - VB.NET

Form.BringToFront
 
I was programing in Visual Studio 2010. I ran into this problem and saw no answers in any Google searches. I Saw a whole lot of very complicated and even crazy work arounds so I'm posting this to possibly help someone else who runs into a similar issue.
 
The problem was when I tried to get focus on the new form after it opened it would always stay in the background. This subroutine simply checks to see if a window is open with a flag I set and if it is I focus on it. When the program closes it sets the flag back to 0. I could not get the window to focus when I used
 
Dim frm as New vtfrmsearch
 
by removing the Dim statement everything worked perfect.
 

Private Sub SearchTempToolStripMenuItem_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles SearchTempToolStripMenuItem.Click

     If SearchOpen = 1 Then
        vtfrmsearch.Focus()


     End If


    If SearchOpen = 0 Then
        vtfrmsearch.Show()
        SearchOpen = 1
    End If

End 


If you want a form to always stay on top until it is closed use:

vtfrmsearch.ShowDialog()


Sub