Shandy's Blog

Here is one person's take (Robert McLaw) on what it requires to be a Microsoft MVP, How to Become a Microsoft MVP . Robert has some interesting views on the subject and some of the responses to his blog post are well er how shall we say - interesting? I certainly don't agree with all that Robert says but he certainly makes some valid points and many that I do agree with.

I had a look through the different skins that are available for my blog. I found two or three I quite liked but in the end decided to stay with the default vbCity one. I must be getting old as I don't seem to like change as much as I once did ;-)

Anyway I did add a couple of items to my blog today:

A Microsoft MVP Logo image at the top left of my blog.

A link to the Blog Herald. This looks an interesting news site containing purely news associated with blogging. I shall keep an eye on this and see what its like.

I was going to upload a picture of myself to my blog too but the lead that attaches my digital camera to my PC appears to have gone walkabout so I'll try and sort that out at a later date.

I feel a bit like a mountain climber everytime I try and do something with the .NET tab control. I just know there is going to be some new obstacles to overcome. Today I noticed on this thread at vbCity an interesting question, How do I make it when I select a tab, the other one Dims, or looks inactive. and so decided to try and answer it.

The first major problem was that the tab control simply doesn't support any sort of altering of the tab text directly. When you disable the tab all the controls on the tab become disabled, not the tab itself. This lead onto the two issues I needed to overcome, namely

I had no idea how to control the drawing of the tab text.

I've never actually found out what is involved in making a control look disabled.

Never one to let small problems like that put me off I returned to a site that djjeavons had pointed out to me in this post, Re: How do I disable or make a tab control tab invisible.The web site is Mick Dohertys DotNet Tips - TabControl. Mick has some excellent code examples for how to extend the tab control's functionality.

Mick had some code that showed how to change the colours of the tab text and background and so after a few minutes spent trawling the internet to find out what colours I should be using to make a control look disabled I was able to perform a small tweak to Mick's code and get the non-selected tabs to look disabled.

For the record it appears that for a disabled control the background colour should remain the same but the text colour should change to System.Drawing.SystemColors.GrayText. I posted the code and hope it provides the solution extatic was looking for. I'll add this functionality to my tab control extension class.

After reading MSN Messenger 7.0 out Today! I downloaded and installed MSN Messenger v7, upgrading my 6.2 version. Visually there are some nice improvements like a person's personal picture displayed in the pop that appears when they come on-line. There appear to be more icons and something called winks (which I think I shall be giving a miss). There also appears to be a drawing facility which looks quite cool. I'll have to find someone else with v7 to try this out with.

MSN Messenger is the only on-line chat program I now use. I'm not a compulsive chatter though. I only give out my MSN Messenger ID to people I know. We also use it as a tool to communicate at work between myself in Sri Lanka and the IT department in the UK.

Well I don't know if these are new features but I had time to have a gander through the various features in MSN and I noticed a few things I was unaware of before:

I can display personal message in addition to my handle

I can get my personal message to be replaced by the title of the track I am playing in Windows Media Player

There is an icon to log me straight into My Space