Can't Grok, Won't Grok

While thinking and reflecting in my Marmite Moment , I hit on a key point in my mind. I am, and pretty much always have been a student without a master . Like most geeks, I got in to computing at a relatively young age (I think I wrote my first line on code at about age 10). I had relatives and friends that sparked my curiosity in computing, messing around with installs, playing games and then coding. Video games fascinated me, but the thing that I really loved is the concept of this machine can do anything you tell it to . This is why I got in to applications development rather than games programming (which is a completely different world – often not realised by non-programmers). I didn’t want to create realities, I wanted to solve problems. So, I was always the computer geek. I was the nerd in class, I was the nerd in the family, I was the nerd in the peer group. Hi, my name is Rob and I am a nerd. The problem (?) is that this has always seemed to be the case, I have only w...

Having read the following question from MattBerry on the student forum for the MCAD I am studying towards: Does anyone know how to make a custom control the top most control on a form i.e. its z-order. I know forms create the z-order in the order the controls are created, and I know you can use the control.BringToFront method after all controls have been created. What I want to know is, is it possible to set this z-order in the custom control's code, so that it can be encapsulated? It sparked my curiosity, can it be done? I have never tried anything like this myself. And yes, there is a side of me that would get REALLY pissed off with using a control that did this, but I thought “what the hell?” lets have a look and see what we can do. Now, a bit of disclosure, it has been a while since I done any Windows development, so this may well be possible to do a lot easier, but hey, it took me 15 minutes :P Getting Started I had no real ide...

OK - So I have just got in from work and forced myself to get on Live Writer since I knew damn well if I didn't, another day would go by without a blog post - and I actually have a few things stacked up that I want to cover. So, here is the first - I would like to coin two new terms: "Twarkov" OK, yes, this one is a little bit of stupidity and silliness, but there is method behind my madness, so hear me out :P Recently there seems to have been a surge of spam bot's on Twitter . Now, this confuses me, because I really don't know what type of content they could be harvesting, or what they could hope to obtain by spamming on there. Since its obvious they are bot's, people will block them straight away, so they are not going to get any link-clicks. I have a theory in that maybe the spam companies are getting smarter and going to start targeting spam based on the topics of interest that you discuss (similar to Google Adsense ). So, "why 'Twark...

OK, so I am sat here at work doing the usual keyboard smashing when I come across a problem, any/all help would be greatly appreciated as a lot of this is new to me… The Scenario I need to create a custom control to present data based on the properties of a custom type. This type contains some summary properties, and a couple of internal collections of items. The presentation logic of this is to be encapsulated in its own ASP.NET control. I have a ASP.NET web page, which will be the container for the control. This page will fetch the data for the control within the Page_Load event, when it receives the object back from the Web Service is should then pass the object to the control, which will render it. 1: // The Custom ASP.NET Control Definition 2: public class ListItemGridView : WebControl 3: { 4: public SerializableList List 5: { 6: get { return _list; } 7: set { _list = value ; } ...