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.NET does not give you possibilities to create animated GIFs through GDI+. At least 1.1 doesn’t, they might incorporate it in 2.0. But there are ways to make them! This solution is one I used myself, and I’m very pleased! //Variable declaration StringCollection stringCollection; MemoryStream memoryStream; BinaryWriter binaryWriter; Image image; Byte[] buf1; Byte[] buf2; Byte[] buf3; //Variable declaration stringCollection = a_StringCollection_containing_images; Response.ContentType = “Image/gif”; memoryStream = new MemoryStream(); buf2 = new Byte[19]; buf3 = new Byte[8]; buf2[0] = 33; //extension introducer buf2[1] = 255; //application extension buf2[2] = 11; //size of block buf2[3] = 78; //N buf2[4] = 69; //E buf2[5] = 84; //T buf2[6] = 83; //S buf2[7] = 67; //C buf2[8] = 65; //A buf2[9] = 80; //P buf2[10] = 69; //E buf2[11] = 50; //2 buf2[12] = 46; //.

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The title isn’t descriptive enough for this post, but it will have to do. Today I was trying to get an ASP.NET application to allow me to define two different login levels. What I was trying to do was the following: There’s a main ASP.NET application, which is allowed to be accessed by anyone (<allow users="*"> at https://www.domain.com/) There’s a customer part where a login is required. (https://www.domain.com/customers/) There’s a maintenance part where a different login is required.

I stumbled upon a great workspace at GotDotNet: Visual Studio Core Community Powertoys. Here you can find some pretty neat powertoys for the Visual Studio IDE. For example: Go Back Visual Studio Add-In The Go Back Add-in provides a Navigate Backward functionality that is different than the normal Navigate Backward functionality. (Which does some neat things like close a file if you happened to have opened it while navigating forward)

At the Powertoys Weblog, Sara Ford posted about a very cool tool which is available at gotdotnet: Regex Builder. At gotdotnet it is described as follows: A tool for building and testing Regular Expressions. It allows you to manipulate the expression and your source text, and shows you a tree with all of the Matches, Groups, and Captures found in the text. I think this tool is easier to use for RegEx beginners than for instance The Regulator, because its GUI is pretty simple and there’s some standard information available at startup.

Last friday Chris Wilton posted about IE7 Beta on the Microsoft Internet Explorer Weblog (IEBlog). The two most important features for IE 7: Support for the alpha channel in PNG images. CSS standards compliance! Furthermore, it’s nice to know not only Visual Studio 2005 will be released this summer… … when we release the first beta of IE7 this summer.

Questa star-listed me on his blog (together with Frans Bouma!). He wrote: De blog van Gump is nog jong, maar tot nu toe voor mij in iedergeval al de meest gelezen weblog Which roughly translates to Gump’s blog is still young, but is the blog I recently read most. I’m flattered Questa: thanks! I’ll try to keep up the good work and live up to my star status. 😉

The last couple of years I’ve had small Visual Studio crashes, where Visual Studio stopped and asked me if I wanted to restart and reopen the current project. These crashes never meant a loss of work. Today I had the first BIG VS2K3 crash and this time it did cost me. A lot… I’m wondering why VS stopped responding completely. The network here at our client isn’t that fast this morning, but I can not imagine this being the problem.

Sure, I’m not the first one to blog about it. But I still didn’t want it to go unnoticed… Visual Studio .NET 2005 Beta 2 is out now. (Available for people with MSDN subscriptions) For those of you who don’t have an MSDN subscription, the Express Editions can give an idea of the power .NET 2.0 will bring to you. The first impressions of people around me are good. Better yet, those first impressions are VERY good.

Most of you probably know about the refactoring options Visual Studio 2005 will deliver to us. For those of you who would like to experience what refactoring, using optimization, partial code generation and more feels like without waiting for VS2K5, you should try JetBrains’ ReSharper. I installed it yesterday (after having downloaded it a few weeks ago) and it’s a great addition to the Visual Studio development environment. And having experienced this, I want VS2K5 to come out even sooner….

Dino Esposito wrote an excellent article on the new and improved DataGridView control in .NET 2.0 in the .NET magazine of April this year. It explains the possibilities the newly built gridcontrol gives you. Finally a decent grid control… Curious what .NET 2.0 will bring you? This is a must read!

Read on my favourite forum today, in someone’s signature: In a perfect world… spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penisses, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship.