Tanner’s Space

Just a quick tip for anyone that fights to try and style the status strip control at runtime in one of their projects.

If you want to use runtime stylings you must keep the “rendermode” property of the status strip set to “System”. If you use the “Professional” choice instead of “System” you will get a skin style that matches your OS (So if XP then your status strip will render in XP style, if Vista or Win7 then you get their style).

However, no matter how correctly your code is written to modify the status strip it wont actually ever work unless you keep that rendermode property set to “System”

Code stuff, microsoft runtime stylings, status strip, winforms

I was out on a work trip a few weeks ago and ran into quite a issue while trying to create a new windows service project in visual studio 2008. Quite simply, the template for the service project type does not exist.

After much searching I have discovered that this project type only exists in the Professional and Team System Editions of Visual Studio. This is kind of a bummer, because we develop a lot of services and tend to buy the standard edition for client machines.

However, there is a workaround or two. If you create your project on another machine (dev box) you can move your source and solution files to a machine running the standard edition without worry.

If you are a developer and stuck with only the standard edition then you just need what I call a dummy service file. It’s a service that was named and saved, but no code written. Just get someone to make you that and keep it on your machine if your spec calls for a service.

I am also told that you can extract the template file from a higher level edition of Visual Studio and then import that template into your Standard Edition install. However, after many tries to import environment settings I gave up and used the dummy project so I could just get to work.

Hopefully this helps someone if you find yourself looking for answers to this predicament.

The only question that remains is “Microsoft, why would you take this out of one of the most commonly sold editions of your product?” It can’t be because of the money, because you already have tons of that.

Code stuff, microsoft service, service project missing, services, template, template missing, VS, VS 2008, VS2008

Lately there has been a TON of talk about “Cloud Computing” and everyone seems to want to develop their applications to fit this model. Well this is the same thing pretty much as SaaS (software as a service) was a couple years back. Some people can use it, some people cannot.

I happen to work in an industry that cannot (materials handling). I would venture to say that healthcare organizations are going to have a hard time with this too because of patient HIPAA rights.

There has also been a large jump in Open Source Computing and more businesses are looking at this as an option. They love the free part. And people are slowly learning that the curve is not as steep as many have led them to believe.

We are a Microsoft development house. So we don’t use any open source stuff here, with the exception of OpenOffice on a few machines. I worry about big blue because they have chosen to dump a lot of focus into this SaaS stuff and we can’t use any of it yet.

So I can’t help but feel that I’m looking at a fork in the road. Which way do you choose? What if the choices don’t fit? What are the consequences of diverting on your own path?

I wish I had answers to a couple of those questions so I would know how to direct my focus.

..and Geez, I just got a grip on Web 2.0 and now it’s almost “officially considered dead“. Web 3.0 isn’t taking off very fast so maybe that gives me time to catch up on the rest of things.

That’s all for now.

Code stuff, Tech Cloud Computing, microsoft, Open Source, SaaS, technology, web2.0