Using HSL Color (Hue, Saturation, Luminosity) to Create Better-Looking GUIs (Part 1)

Introduction Business applications often have multiple screens that simply present grids of data. One way of making these applications more user-friendly is to use different colors on the backgrounds for such screens. Then you can talk about the ‘blue screen’ rather than the ‘intra-day warehousing report screen’. However, if you are not careful with your …

Reasons Not to Use TableAdapters in .NET 2.0

Introduction We have decided to ban the use of TableAdapters on our project for the time being. This is because there is no way that we can see of doing centralized connection management using them. Every TableAdapter is capable of creating its own new Connection object. There’s no easy way of overriding that so that …

A Beginner’s Guide to calling a .NET Framework Library from Excel

Introduction It’s fairly straightforward to call a .NET Framework library directly from Excel on Windows, particularly if you are using Visual Studio.  You don’t need Visual Studio Tools for Office.  However there doesn’t seem to be an easy guide on the internet anywhere. The Microsoft documentation is quite good on the subject, but can be …

Top-level Exception Handling in Windows Forms Applications

Introduction In .NET exception handling has become a much simpler issue than in previous programming languages. For example, in many older languages it was considered good practice to put an exception handler in every routine, and also to return a value to indicate success or failure from each routine. In .NET Windows Forms applications these …

Top-level Exception Handling in Windows Forms Applications – Code Listing 1

  This code listing is available for download.    This is a very basic code example of how to use the ThreadException event to handle exceptions occurring anywhere on the main GUI thread in a Windows Forms application.  My blog article 'Top-level Exception Handling in Windows Forms Applications' discusses this in more detail.   From …