I’ll be visiting my family over Christmas, so if you’re trying to contact me you’ll have to expect delays. So, a very merry Christmas to everybody out there, and let’s go for a happy new year as well, in case I don’t manage to post again before then. Thanks for reading!

There it is. If you want to create multi-platform (currently Windows Forms and ASP.NET) applications fast, be sure to have a look at beta 1 of the eXpressApp Framework.

Here’s the official announcement, which also has some information on pricing.

I have quite a few things lined up for 2007 so far. Of course I’m still – always – looking for other opportunities, so if you’d like me to to a session at your user group, conference or other event, please feel free to contact me!

Here’s what I have so far:

Maybe I’m not getting the joke, but it looks like the company New Standard Keyboards wants to sell us on keyboards that have a layout with keys in alphabetical order. As I have blogged before, I’m using a keyboard in Dvorak layout with my desktop PC, and I have configured my laptop keyboard to Dvorak as well (I also swapped the keys around physically, which isn’t described in that article – I find it useful when I’m doing presentations and need to hit a certain key without actually having both hands on the keyboard).

Now, I’m sure most of us tend to have an averse reaction to the idea of using a different keyboard/-layout, because we’ve just gotten used to what we’ve always been doing. But the idea of the alphabetical keyboard sounds especially strange to me, as that’s where it all started… look here, the paragraph titled “History and Purpose” explains how the QWERTY layout was invented nearly 140 years ago to overcome the shortcomings of the alphabetical system. I believe that the Dvorak layout does a far better job at organizing the letters in a way that’s useful for (western) language typing, but at least QWERTY also had kind of a scientific idea behind it… the whole idea about New Standard Keyboards seems to be “let’s do something new (or at least something that hasn’t been around for a while), maybe we can sell it to some people who don’t know better.”

I recently saw a post in an MS newsgroup and as I had an example that I wrote earlier, I just thought I’d make it available. What this does is simple: it implements custom handling of the non-client area of a window. The non-client area is, normally, the area of a window that is not part of the client area (duh!), like that used for adornments, window buttons, borders, that kind of thing.

While the user moves the mouse over a window’s area, Windows sends messages to figure out which part of the window is currently underneath the mouse cursor, and if it finds certain areas, it handles the corresponding functionality itself. By overriding the default behaviour and returning the right values for these messages, it’s therefore easy to have Windows activate the resize behaviour of the right border, for instance, although the mouse cursor is actually not over the right border at that moment (or even if there isn’t any right border at all).

My sample program draws some rects on its client area that “pose” as the borders of the window, as well as the title bar and the resize rect in the lower right hand corner. Looks like this:

Here’s the download, which includes source code as well as a compiled version of the application, in case you just want to try it quickly.

CustomNCHandling.zip (15 K