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 am pretty upset that microsoft would boldly state all of the following as ringing in true for IE8 when in all reality not a single one of their points holds water.

IE8 == secure? No.
More customizable? No. Show me where ie8 has add-ons to do even 5% of what the firefox extensions can do.

Here’s the whole chart. Anyone who knows why they should use alternate browsers should also be offended by this.

What makes me most upset about this is that the millions of users that do not know any better will assume the data on this chart to be truth just because it’s posted on MS’s site.

I’ll keep firefox thanks.  But Bing is nice, good work guys!  But this…..THIS is not productive use of your resources.

Tech, Web Design, microsoft ie8, internet explorer 8, the fail chart

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