C#

Creating a plugin architecture in a C# application is a fairly easy task. The video below will walk you through the process of setting up the plugin architecture and it will implement a simple plugin.



The source for the project can be downloaded Here.

The video below gives an overview of creating a ComboBox that does conditional formatting. The code uses regular expressions to determine if an item in a combobox should have special formatting. The code is nowhere near production ready, but it should give you an idea of how to do formatting of items in a combobox drop down list. See the full post if you want to copy the code.

If you have used the Visual Studio Extensions for Sharepoint to create more than one list, then you will probably be familiar with the problem of all custom List Definitions are given the name ListDefinition1. This causes problems when you activate the feature, because SharePoint already thinks ListDefinition1 exists.

To fix this problem, there are a few things that need to be changed in your project.

1.) Rename the ListDefinition1 folder in your solution.
2.) Change the URL in the Instance.XML. You'll probably want to change the display name as well, but that is not necessary.
3.) Change the Name in the ListDefinition.xml. Again, you'll probably want to change the display name as well.

Some things to keep in mind are that the display name column is used in one of the folder names that is created by the extensions, so if you use a character that SharePoint doesn't like (i.e. an apostrophe) you will get an error.

If you get an error when deploying, your best bet is to fix the error in VS, delete the PKG folder, and then rebuild and deploy your solution.

Getting the current day of week in C# is pretty easy, if all you need is the english version of the day, for example:
But if you want to get the Day of Week for the current language the computer is setup for, the above code will not work. You need to access the Globalization class and get the day of week from there. The snippet of code below, demonstrates how to do it:

I have started playing with using Generics in C# and I think they have some great uses. I use ArrayLists in many places in applications to keep track of groups of variables that are all of the same type. The generics will let me explicitly state what is going to be stored in the array, making my code easier to maintain. It also removes the need to cast an item from an Object to it's correct type every time I need to access it.

Here is a small sample of how to use a generic list:

            //Create our List
            System.Collections.Generic.List<House> Houses = new List<House>();

            //Populate the list with Items
            Houses.Add (new House("1234 Main St.","Royal Oak", "MI", "48123"));
            Houses.Add (new House("8825 Fifth Ave.","New York", "NY", "98653"));
            Houses.Add (new House("5456 South Lawn Rd.","Oak Creek", "IN", "65789"));

            //Retreive an item from the list 
            //(Note: there is no need to cast this, because it is already of type House)
            House x = Houses[2];

            //You can still loop through the items in the generic lists
            foreach (House oHouse in Houses)
            {
                listBox1.Items.Add(oHouse.Address);
            }

So I have started on the XM interface for the classes that I have written previously. My main focus was making it work and I will worry about the looks of the application later. I have it connecting to XM and playing the streaming media via Windows media player. I am making some nice progress, but I really want to make the channel list screen look nice, so I will probably work on that next.