I can give your email a try, but I am on the other side of the world from you in the US, so It may be faster to us CP, but I'll give it a try and see.

cnurse wrote: If I hook into the application message pump, then presumably, as controls run "in process" I will be able to hook into every Windows Forms App that utilises my controls? Most likely, yes. It greatly depends on the container application, though. I don't forsee you having any The ".NET" way of things has nothing to do with Windows Forms or anything else, actually. .NET is Microsoft's brand of the CLI, or Common Language Infrastructure. Windows Forms is part of the BCL and actually encapsulates the Common Controls (like Edit, Rich Edit, Static, etc.) and many, many other Windows APIs and other Win32 APIs. Handling messages in this way is nothing different from what Microsoft is doing. That's why the Control class defines the WndProc method (among other Windows Platform-related members) - not just so you can use it but so that they can use it to encapsulates the Common Controls. Software Design Engineer Developer Division Sustained Engineering, Microsoft My Articles

Thanks but I know how to get to the messages. As I said the problem has always been what messages to process. To be specific, what messages do I have to trap and process if I want to take entire responsibility for NC processing/drawing? Do I always have to perform the default processing then do my thing? See? Thanks. Nursey

You're comparing apples and oranges, there. pTable is an instance, and the typeof operator will always return a Type, so the two would never match unless pTable was a variable which held a Type. If you want to check is something is an instance of a particular type, simply use the is operator: if (pTable is DataTable) { // ... } You can also use something like this, although it requires more code and more instructions (when compiled to IL): if (pTable != null) { if (pTable.GetType() == typeof(DataTable)) { // ... } } There's other ways of doing this, but you don't have to take inheritance into account. If CustomerTable inherits form DataTable, then any instance is a type of CustomerTable, DataTable, MarshalByValueComponent, and - as with everything in .NET - Object. It's also an instance of any interfaces that any classes up the inheritence hierarchy implement. This isn't true going down the hierarchy, though. For example, if you instantiate a new instance of a DataTable, then it is not an instance of a CustomerTable. Also keep in mind that it's not the declaration that counts, its the definition. For example: object o = new DataTable("Example"); While o is declared as an object, it's still an instance of a DataTable. Calling o.GetType will return System.Data.DataTable. This is polymorphism. Microsoft MVP, Visual C# My Articles

Attributes are inheritted by nature, but code which gets and uses these attributes - like MemberInfo.GetCustomAttributes - provide parameters that specify whether or not the calling code wants to get inheritted parameters. What behavior is this that you mention? There's many things that can contribute to problems you're facing. Remember, attributes don't provide functionality to Types, they merely extend the metadata of a Type so that if something asks for it the attribute and its data is returned. Simply attributing your class with a custom attribute certainly won't do anything if nothing asks for it and uses it. Microsoft MVP, Visual C# My Articles

At least document everything public and protected, anything which can be seen by other code. Use all relevent XML tags. This includes, obviously, the <summary>. If your method has parameters, then use the <param> tags. If you return values, use the <returns> tag. If you explicitly throw an exception or let one slide that you want to make sure developers know is possible, use the <exception> tags. Basically, use any tags that are relevent to the to member. If you want to provide more information about something, then use the <remarks> and/or <example> tags. For a great and free documentation compiler, see NDoc[^]. I've had the pleasure of working on it and I know this product is stable. Just look at the huge list of clients, including Microsoft. It can generate many formats like HTML Help 1 (ex: VS6 docs) and 2 (ex: VS7+ docs). It looks just like the current VS.NET / MSDN documentation as well. For larger products in a corporate environment, you might consider abstracting all comments away to separate files. Then use the <include> tag to specify an XPath expression that imports the documentation. This seems to be what Microsoft does since many members - especially overloaded methods - share the same content for various sections. Microsoft MVP, Visual C# My Articles

Anything that supports the standard source control interface can be used with VS.NET. Here are a couple of good resources: - http://www.cvshome.org[^] - http://www.codeproject.com/macro/CVS_with_VSNET.asp[^] - http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/mani.net/archive/2003/12/23/4854.aspx[^] Hope these help! Michael Flanakin Web Log

I tried installing from CD and downloading it. It seems to be a problem mentioned a few times on the WEB. I've had .NET installed for a while and VS6 went straight on. I tried to then open a project and it seems it needs a refeference to COMCT332.OCX from SP5, so I tried to install it. The SP5 setup starts after searching for installed components then shows the message that the installation did not complete successfully. Any other offers? I don't know what I could have done to make this setup not work. Thanks Nursey

There is a tool that has total impressed me. You can check it out on this website: http://t4-editor.tangible-engineering.com Absolutely amazing in my view, Best UML tool Integrated to VS 2008

cnurse wrote: The thing I have in the back of my mind is to run the application which could be developed in .NET, as a web app. There would be the minimum of downloads then, and of course nobody has to work hard to keep up to date with the latest version! 8-) I only have to rollout to one location too, sounds good huh!? Web apps can be good. HREF-EXEs (also known as ClickOnce or No-Touch Deployment) look better :-) Unfortunately for you, it would seem to be best suited to corporate LANs: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/vbtchno-touchdeploymentinnetframework.asp[^] But in the longer term, this might be how a lot of software is deployed in future generally. Ian Darling "The different versions of the UN*X brand operating system are numbered in a logical sequence: 5, 6, 7, 2, 2.9, 3, 4.0, III, 4.1, V, 4.2, V.2, and 4.3" - Alan Filipski

Ray, Replies like yours are the reason I love this web site, well thought out, constructive and strictly in the vein of the problem. Thanks you. I think I have a partially thought out solution... If I serialize class A and want to add members to it then I should derive A using class B and add the members there. I can call A.Serialize from B.SerializeOldVersion, get me? Then I can B.Serialize and B.Deserialize and all my new members will be handled correcly. OK, its partially thought out because if there are relating objects then those relationships could mudy the water somewhat. But in theory, this meets the "don't change your interfaces" school of thought. I think deriving would certainly be the way through to data conversion though, then effectively you can roll all the stuff up into one class again. My ambitious thoughts are in this area though. As I am using SOAP format for serialization as oppose to binary format, at least for the time being (there's nothing quite like being able to see your megabytes of data in text format hehehe) well...to cut a long one short, there ought to be a structured way of massaging the data. i.e. you could write an XML parser, which a very good friend of ours on here has done recently, and insert the new fields where neccessary...then hey presto. I think there is definite potential in this approach. Again, your additional thoughts are very welcome. Many thanks. Nursey

Hi Guille, Yeh but I would still cast TopNode to a TreeNodeCommand see? The problem seems to be casting the node causes the tree to duplicate itself, get me? Nursey