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Wednesday, 27 December 2006
Quite some time ago, I documented how manifest files can be used to make VB6 applications look like they were designed for Windows XP. Having recently worked on a project which liberally used third-party ActiveX controls, I experienced one major pitfall of this approach.
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Thursday, 21 December 2006
I’ve been asked a question similar to this one a number of times over the last few years:
Our business partner has a “members only” area on their public website and they have given us our very own “access code” in order to gain access to that area. How do we access the “members only” area directly, bypassing their web form which prompts for the “access code”?
Provided your business partner’s website doesn’t bother checking the “HTTP referer” field when the request is made by the client software connecting to them, something as simple as this will do:
<form action="http://someinsecurewebsite.com/" method="post">
<a href="javascript:document.forms[0].submit()">click me, click me</a>
<input name="accesscode" type="hidden" value="abc123" />
</form>
I’m assuming that your business partners URL for the web form is “http://someinsecurewebsite.com/”, the name of their access code field is “accesscode” and that your allocated access code is “abc123″. I’m also assuming that your web page which contains the above code has no other forms and that the client browser has JS enabled.
I won’t comment on what I think of the practice of providing such a weak security mechanism to provide access to restricted areas of public websites. I’ll save that for a future post. But let’s just say that it’s still a popular choice when you only want to discourage the general public from seeing certain sections of your website.
Saturday, 16 December 2006
If your corporate “standard operating environment” precludes you from changing the default (blue) Windows XP desktop theme and your system administrators have disabled your registry editor, here’s an alternative way of doing it:
Open up a command shell window by clicking on the “Start” button and selecting the “Run” menu option. Export the ThemeManager registry key by typing in
REG EXPORT "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ThemeManager" THEME.REG
(all on one line) in the command shell. This will create a text file called “THEME.REG” which you will edit in the next step. Edit the file you just created by typing in
START NOTEPAD THEME.REG
in the command shell and change the subkey ColorName from NormalColor to either HomeStead or Metallic, depending on whether you want an olive or silver theme. Import your changes back into the registry by typing in
REG IMPORT THEME.REG in the command shell.
You will need to log off and back on again for the changes to take affect.
Tuesday, 12 December 2006
Having recently decided to get serious about managing my personal finances, I started to look around for something which had all the important features but didn’t require an accounting degree to use. Essentially, I was after a simple application which would enable me to track my spending habits to see where all the money goes.
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Friday, 8 December 2006
One of the more subtle aspects of traditional VB application development is controlling the screen cursor when you’re performing some lengthy operation which might involve multiple functions or subroutines. The polite thing to do is obviously set the screen cursor to an hourglass just before you commence a processing task which is likely to take more than second or so. The polite thing is to also switch it back to an arrow, once you’re finished.
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