Joel on Software discusses this MSDN article about Inductive UI.

 Dino's Cutting Edge has added many features to the MessageBox using Windows Hooks.

Solution to the CollectionEditor problem. Collection of complex objects and how to persist the values at design time.

Common mistakes with DataGrids

By Marcie Robillard (DataGrid Girl)

[Via: Artima Developer Buzz]

Click here to go to the source

1. Naming Conventions
2. n-tier applications
   • Coupling: Pass control references to business logic
   • Cohesion: Highly Spcific Code
3. Use inheritance for extensibility and maintainability: You should also invest the time in creating a component framework from which your classes can be built. This rich architecture will make your derived classes much more elegant
4. Reduce resource usage: Reduce number of static controls on the form
5. Have Auto-updateable applications: Have an application components Web Farm from which various forms and assemblies are downloaded.
6. Variety of error handling techniques and logging
7. Reduce number of calls between processes
8. Testing: Can use Visual Studio Analyser

Been struggling with XP themes and how .net treats those controls. Realised that there is a Application.EnableVisualStyle( ) method that lets you use the XP style rendering of controls. But the FlatStyle property needs to be changed to System for those controls deriving from ButtonBase, GroupBox, or Label (for others its a default). After doing all this the application looked quite OK with the buttons looking like XP buttons, the tabbed windows changing colors to the XP theme, and the group box corners getting rounded.

If the System style is used, the appearance of the control is determined by the user's operating system and the following property values will be ignored: Control.BackgroundImage, ImageAlign, Image, ImageIndex, ImageList, and TextAlign. In addition, the Control.BackColor property will be ignored for button controls. If supported, users can change the appearance of controls by adjusting the appearance settings of their operating system.

CAUTION   Setting the FlatStyle property to FlatStyle.System is not advisable if you need to display an image on a control, display an image as a control's background, or perform precise text alignment.

However my application puts a group box inside a tab page. Therein lies the problem.

http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/dotnetvisualstyles.asp

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpref/html/frlrfsystemwindowsformsflatstyleclasstopic.asp

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/?url=/library/en-us/dnwinforms/html/xpthemeaddin_.asp?frame=true

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwxp/html/xptheming.asp

http://www.codeproject.com/cs/miscctrl/themedtabpage.asp

http://www.binarymission.co.uk/binarysmartbutton.aspx

http://www.dotnet247.com/247reference/msgs/10/53683.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpguide/html/cpconrenderingwindowsformscontrol.asp

http://www.codeproject.com/managedcpp/ManagedUxTheme.asp

http://www.infragistics.com/products/lookandfeel.asp?sec=5&cat=-1

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnvssamp/html/vbcs_xpthemesupport.asp

Source: Early and Adopter Weblog

Joel Spolsky explains how character encoding and Unicode can be used for language support. But still not clear enough to me.

.NET Undocumented talks about “What is Avalon“.

Also read Mort, Elvis or Einstein and Seeing Bill Gates' House.

http://www.dotnetforums.net/t74889.html

Jeff Keys has numerous utilities written in .net

Can be found here.