That error usually means that an exception occured in the service when the service tried to start. See if you can build the service and run it as a winforms application or a console application and try to find what is causing the error. Alternatively you could use exception handling and write all exceptions to a file or to the windows log. That way you might be able to find what is causing the service to stop when trying to start.

Try to set the Visible property to false in the constructor of the form and see if that helps.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here. A text file contains no information about any fonts or other formatting. A txt file only contains a bunch of characters so the font you choose to display the text with is completely up to you. There simply doesnt exist any information about a font to a text file.

We probably need more information to be able to help. Like what you did with the installers and such.

I managed to find a solution. I had a custom action in the installation to handle the Installer classes I had in my projects and there is a propery for a custom action called CustomActionData there. By setting the value of that parameter to /installdir="[TARGETDIR]\" I could get the installation directory in my Installer class with this code: this.Context.Parameters["installdir"]. And that was all I needed. Took a while to find all parts of this solution and puzzle it together. I found one part of this solution at a time. Nowhere was it explained all the way. Thanks everybody for trying to help me!

I have created a windows installer i VS.NET 2003 to install my application. The application consists of a windows service, a small winforms application and some dll's. The application installs and runs fine but only when I have hardcoded a path I have in a settings file. What I want to do is get the folder where I install the application and write that to the file when I install the application. Because that is what I want, the default path for this setting should be the folder where the application is installed. So is there any way to get that folder during the installation? I have tried using the Installer class but they alone doesnt seem to be enough. The only folder I can get from there is C:\windows\system32 which happens to be the current folder in the Installer class.

I am at the moment building a client/server application using .NET. This is a Win Forms based app and for the communication I thought I would use sockets. But someone just mentioned "why dont you use remoting?". I dont know how skilled this person is and how much experience he has with remoting and/or sockets so I cant really know based on what he made that comment. The application is nothing out of the ordinary really. The server has a database and the client interacts with the server and inserts, updates, deletes and requests data to/from the server. All clients and the server are all on a local network. What I really need to know is, how do I know when I have an application that is a good candidate to use remoting for its network communication?

This might not be the best forum for this question but I hope someone will be able to answer it anyway. I have a bunch of nunit tests that I want to run. The problem is that they fail if run them all. If I run them one by one they work fine. These tests tests some sockets network code. The network connection is done using a static object. This means all tests use the same network connection object. I thought that the tests run one after the other, but it seems they run in parallell sometimes. This has the effect that a test connects to the server and starts doing what the test does and then another test opens a new connection with the effect that the state needed in the first tests is lost, and thereby causing the first test to fail. So the real question is how NUnit runs the tests? Does it run them one after the other or (atleast to some degree) in parallell?

Is there anyone who has any experience with programming .NET applications for Windows NT 4.0? I have to make a network enabled application and I know that the server atleast runs NT 4. Basically the server will have to be able to handle networking with sockets, threads for dealing with multiple clients and ADO.NET for dealing with a database. So if you have any experience at all about these parts or anything else on NT 4 please let me know if I have got myself into a lot of trouble by saying I could do this. When I check the MSDN documentation for some of the classes I'm gonna need they all say they are supported on NT 4 so maybe I have just got scared totally unnecessary but I really need to know about problems that may arise. Isn't the idea with the CLR and IL that an assembly would run on all supported operating systems with a working .NET framework, right? So basically there shouldnt be any problems?

In a page I have a CheckBoxList. What I would need is a way to make the text for each line of the checkboxlist clickable as a link. This link would not check the box but would just open a popup with information about that item. Is this possible?

I am getting crazy with this problem. I am working on a page that is to display the milestones in a project. Each milestone contains a number of document templates that are to be listed under their correct milestone. This would create something like nested lists and I have absolutely no idea of how to do them. Right now I can only list the milestones. I do this with a repeater. Now I need a way to get into each row of this repeater and show the templates there. I have read articles on the net about nesting repeaters but they dont apply to the way I have constructed my code. They rely completely on a dataset and that you add relations in this dataset. I have one arraylist with objects that describe the milestones. For each milestone I get another arraylist containing the templates for that specific milestone. Please if you have any idea of how to show all this data please tell me. I am not required to use a repeater so any other idea will be helpful aswell. Thanks

I have started doing some research for a relational database modeller. For this I'm gonna need the application to be able to do some drawing. I have been testing some simple things with GDI+ but I started thinking about the possibility of using managed DirectX. What do you think, would I get a performance gain by using DirectX compared to using regular GDI+? Or maybe DirectX would put a too high system requirement for just using the application.

Yes I have overridden the OnPaint event, and I really dont know whether the use of invalidate is excessive or not, but it works for the bottom and right sides of the control, and I invalidate them just as much as I invalidate the top and left sides. The source code is maybe a little too long to show here but if anyone wants to see it I'll be glad to send it to you.

I have just made a control that is resizable. The resizing is performed with the mouse, in the normal windows way. You put the mouse on the resizer box and drag it to desired shape. I have currently made this work for bottom and the right side of the control. When I resize using those resizers everything works fine. When I drag them with the mouse the control is smoothly updated. Here I update the controls width and height properties. But when I try to do the same thing with the top and left side of the control, things dont work as with the bottom and right side. The control gets strange shapes until I release the mouse button and still it doesnt get the correct shape as I would expect. It kind of works, it resizes in the right directions atleast, but not always in the correct distances, and the resize is definately not smooth, it looks completely screwed up during the resize and flickers and everything. The only difference I can see between these edges of the control and the bottom and right is that the top and left sides need to change the controls Top and Left properties and not just its Width and Height. The code is basically exactly the same for all resizes so it seems really strange to me.

Is there a site or company that sells ready made software licenses. I plan to make a program that I will be selling on a web page. I ofcourse need a license agreement that the user has to agree on before using the software. Since I dont have a lot of money and really dont know if the program is gonna sell at all I dont want to spend $2000 on a lawyer to write it for me. But I thought there probably exist ready made licenses that can be bought and used. So is there?

Now that I read it again, I saw that it was me who misinterpreted. Anyway. Thanks for your replies. It really helped me out.

Wow! That is one long and very useful reply. Many thanks! So basically, both methods you mentioned above is better than the solution I proposed I guess from your reply. I dont want to limit the solution to just Win 2000 and above so I guess your second solution is the way I need to go. You mentioned that both my solution and your second solution was in many ways expensive. Is it correct to say that my proposed solution was expensive in terms of memory and window handle usage, and your second solution was expensive in terms of execution speed? One more question is that when I was playing with the code of your second solution I notices that if I removed the line t.Dock = DockStyle.Fill; or set the docking to None in Main the tringle isnt visible. Why is this? In your example the triangle fills the complete area, but I wanted a smaller triangle in the middle, so I thought that docking felt incorrect. Do you have to dock a control to make it visible in the main window or is there another way? One more thing I noticed is that when I run the code above, the triangle responds to clicks outside the triangle itself. If I understood you correctly, you said it would not respond to those clicks.

I was having an idea of a program I want to make. I was just sitting and thinking about it and came up with an idea to a solution where I would use lots of small panels on top of large panel (canvas). The problem is that these small panels arent necessarily completely used. Maybe only parts of them are used. They can also be on top of each other. When they are on top of each other it wont look good if the top panel overdraws panels belowin parts that arent actually used. So is there a way to say that a part of a panel is supposed to be transparent so that things belo are shown instead of the empy panel?

I was working on a ASP.NET project in school. We had a problem that seemed just impossible to solve. We stored an item in a session variable. Buth when certain activities were made to the database, the session variable was empty, for no good reason it seemed. One of the other members of my group spent a lot of time on the problem and discovered that the problem seemed to go away if the access database was moved from the projects bin folder to another place. I remember I had this problem earlier, but then I wasn't working with an access database but xml files. They were placed in the projects bin folder. So the problem seems to be with having files that are being updated in the bin folder. So is there a problem with putting files that changes in the bin folder? An idea might be that ASP.NET recompiles everytime something in the bin folder is changed.

Is it possible to include asp.net code in a .aspx page? What I want to do is create a structure for my pages. So I can create stuff like a header, a menu, a footer, and a presentation part. So bascially, when I create a new .aspx page I copy code from a template to the new page. That template contains the various parts the page consists of. It also contains a part where the parts that are unique to this page can be inserted. Is this possible without using frames? Is there some kind of include that can import code to a .aspx file?