Articles by Richard Arthur

Microsoft .NET Feature Story - Powerful Forms Interaction

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 12:15:00 EST

You have probably seen applications that control their size and positions with greater fluidity than you can get with normal .NET Forms, such as maintaining an aspect ratio while resizing, or docking to the side of a screen. Thankfully there are ways of gaining access to the more powerful aspects of Windows, but they are a bit ugly. In this article, I want to help you write a subclass of Form, which has greater power over its position - namely, I would like to keep the form from ever leaving the screen, not even a part of the side. In the process, we will explore ways to find out about the messages that Windows sends to forms, and how to retrieve their extra data and process those messages in custom ways.

Catching SENS Events in .NET

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 16:00:00 EDT

Microsoft Windows provides a process called the System Event Notification Service. This service raises events relative to interactive logon, network, and power changes. Using this service an application can be notified when network connectivity changes, when available power decreases, or when a person logs on, locks his or screen, or his or her screensaver starts. This service notifies COM+ of these events, which appropriates them to any subscribing application.

Developing for Outlook with the .NET Framework

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST

Microsoft Outlook has an object model that's useful for automating any of the objects that it manages. Items like calendar entries, e-mails and tasks are well designed, but sometimes they don't provide all the functionality that we'd like. For instance, Outlook doesn't provide an easy way to assign a different e-mail background for each of your contacts.