Most people believe that Web applications should use only standard fonts like “Arial” and “Courrier New”. I think so (at least for the moment) but sometimes Web designers use non-standard fonts and you find out about this few months later. What to do? How to make the application behave correctly? Embed the Non-Standard Font into

I am invited to be а speaker at the upcomming seminar for PHP and Web developers that will focus on the integration of PHP with the Microsoft technologies and platforms. The speakers will demonstrate how to run PHP in IIS and how to integrate PHP and .NET applications. My talk will focus on the technologies

Today I researched how to implement in C# a method that forces a COM port to close when it is open by another process. This was found to be a complex task that involves using undocumented Win32 API functions. I didn’t finish it because I found another way to workaround the problem but the idea

I am working on an ActiveX control that allows using a device for scanning personal ID cards in a Web application (based on ASP.NET). The card scanning device (called RTE reader) is accessed using a native DLL that communicates with the device through the COM port by using a proprietary protocol. It is pretty complicated

I needed to enumerate all COM ports in C# and get their name (e.g. COM1, COM2, …) and their description shown in the Windows Device Manager (e.g. “Communications Port”, “RT USB MRTD Reader”). You could find lots of unmanaged code for doing this but I think this C# code could be helpful to people who

Recently my team of 20 authors and few editors working on creating a contemporary book about the fundamentals of computer programming, data structures and algorithms is ready with the public official release of the book: http://introjavabook.googlecode.com/files/Introduction-to-Programing-with-Java-Book-v1.01.pdf. The book “Introduction to Programming with Java” focuses on the fundamentals of computer programming, logical, algorithmical thinking, problem solving,

Last few nights I was debugging very strange bug. Few months ago we shipped Java applet signing Web forms in the client’s Web browser. It was tested under IE 6, IE 7, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Opera 9 and Safari 3 for Windows. We tested with Java 5 and Java 6 in Windows and Linux

I use SWING for long time but I am amazed how slowly this GUI framework evolve and how far is it comparing to Windows Forms, WPF and Flex. One of the small missing things in Swing is that there is not standard way to display an error message with Exception stacktrace. So I created such