Several months ago I finished a series of articles on Visual Basic.NET and MySQL. I have decided to start a new series that will focus more on new features of MySQL 5 and Visual Basic 2005.

The first installment is up at this link and will hopefully be the start of a useful series.

Looks like Microsoft will be offering the express editions of its Visual Studio 2005 products for free* for one year.

The download is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/default.aspx

There is a good feature comparison also available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/products/compare/

I've done a few quick and dirty VB.NET/MySQL apps with the VB2005 Express Edition, and I find it handy. I will want to get into the VS Professional edition as some point just to play with PocketPC, but for now the Express edition is good for the tinkerer in me.

* For the first year, free as in beer, not speech, some conditions apply, offer not valid in all areas, YMMV.

It is still in Alpha, but you can now download Connector/ODBC version 5 from dev.mysql.com!

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/odbc/5.0.html

This is a pretty serious rewrite of the old Connector/ODBC, so please take some time to test and report bugs at bugs.mysql.com.

I encountered a bug recently in my tool where I could right-click on a listview, even if I was not right-clicking on a listview item, and still use the item related entries of a contextMenuStrip. The problem is that unlike the TreeView, the ListView does not allow you to assign a ContextMenuStrip to individual items, just the control as a whole.

The solution was to use the new Opening event of the ContextMenuStrip:

Private Sub eventMenu_Opening(ByVal sender As Object, _
ByVal e As System.ComponentModel.CancelEventArgs) Handles eventMenu.Opening
        If lvwEvents.SelectedItems.Count = 0 Then
            e.Cancel = True
        End If
End Sub

By setting e.Cancel to True, the menu is never shown. I determine whether an item was clicked on by checking the count of selecteditems.

While working on a new feature for my time tracker, I needed to be able to determine how long a user had been idle using VB.NET (so that if I walked away without punching out, the tool could prompt me and punch me out retroactively upon my return). There are a lot of convoluted ways to do this involving a lot of hooks, but there is a nice LASTINPUTINFO call in User32.dll that can be used to accomplish the task with a minimum of coding.

The only limitation is that the call is only available as of Windows 2000, but that is not a concern for me, and I can just disable the functionality for users of earlier versions of Windows.

I have posted a class I found that takes advantage of LASTINPUTINFO for VB.NET at http://www.vbmysql.com/samplecode/idle-time.html.

Introduction

While working on a new project recently, I have been adding various items to the My.Settings collection, which I documented previously in my VB/MySQL tutorial series. I reached the stage in my application where I needed to add an actual configuration form to my application, and I wanted to create one with as little effort as possible. I found that with the new My.Settings collection in Visual Basic.NET 2005 (aka Whidbey) this was even easier than expected.

About My.Settings

The My.Settings collection is a new addition to VB.NET 2005, as part of the new My. namespace. My.Settings provides an easy way to persist user and application settings in XML without any file manipulation.

Aah vacation, a time when married men spend 8 hours a day doing the whim of their wife instead of their company. My vacation started yesterday (or last Friday if you count the Canadian national holiday), and so far I have taken in a parade and done little else.

One thing I am working on is a time tracker tool for myself. I wanted something that was simple that I could develop as a practice project which would be of use to me:

In essence it will be a simple Open Source time tracker/punchclock tool. I am using VB.NET with MySQL 5, SQL trees for managing the project hierarchy, and a nice helping of views, stored procedures, and the like.

This should be handy for keeping track of what I do in a given week, where my time goes, and what I have accomplished. So far I can punch in and out of existing projects, and delete events that …