MoebiusIT

C# settings are a wonderful thing; they provide an easy and powerful way to customize compiled applications by changing data stored in external files.

They work great when they are part of the startup project but - there’s always a but that ends up in a post - when you use them on a referenced project they always take their default value.

After three days of poring over blogs, framework documentation and other resources I concluded that no solution or work-around was readily available, even though the problem seems to be well known.

I tried several approaches, this post will describe the one I consider the best. You can skip the discussion and download the code directly here or keep on reading to find out how it’s done.

Motivation

If you ever had to deal with legacy apps, you must have come across data stored in DBF files; and  if you are  like me, you find it frustrating  that support for  DBFs will depend on factors such as which service packs are installed wherever it is your program must run - and this is often out of your  control, since the “old” system must remain  operative, at least until you migrate the data…or maybe you have to exchange data with such an app on a regular basis, since your client only wants to move part of his business to a new platform.

After one too many such frustrations, I decided to write a small utility that would kill this problem for me once and for all - well, at least as far as clients using VB6 go. No rocket science, but it gets the job done, and I can forget about dll-activex-SP swamps and concentrate on doing my job.

Even though I wrote this for myself, the code is pretty clear (I was planning on reusing it, and I did), so you  can simply download it from here, add it to your VB6 project as an existing module and you’re ready to go.

On the other hand, If you feel like reading on…

The parallel port, like most of the hardware, is becoming each day more unknown to the developers. We are getting used to languages that encapsulate all these low level things for us.

Well, recently I found myself needing to wake up an application of mine when the signal of the parallel port changed. This is what I did!

It’s always useful to redefine operators on your custom types, for they make it easier to follow and mantain the code you’re writting.
So why not do the same with casting operators? Find out how!