A .NET assembly is “signed” if the developer compiled the assembly with the private key of a digital signature. When the system later loads the assembly, it verifies the assembly with the corresponding public key. Occasionally you may need to determine whether an assembly you have loaded has been signed.
There is a very handy .NET class called ControlPaint in the System.Windows.Forms namespace that enables you to draw your own controls and control elements using the standard Windows style and theme. Buried in this rich class are four methods that enable you to lighten and darken colors:
It’s hard to believe the comprehensive .NET framework would omit such obvious functions as GetPixel and SetPixel from its Drawing library. Fortunately, we can access the GDI functions using Interop, as shown below. Notice the conversion required between the COLORREF integer used by the GDI methods and the Color structure used by our static .NET methods.
This multi-part article answers common questions about assemblies, the basic building blocks of .NET applications. This Part 3 discusses assembly security using strong names, signing and public-private key pairs.
This multi-part article answers common questions about assemblies, the basic building blocks of .NET applications. This Part 2 discusses assembly attributes.
Sometimes you need a quick & easy way to search and replace text in a file. The following code shows how it can be done using the static methods on the Regex regular expression class. Because this sample loads the entire file contents in memory, is not appropriate for very large files.
You may wish to enable your WinForms application to run from a console window or command line. And when it does, you probably want to send output messages to the console window that launched your WinForms application.
Unfortunately Console.WriteLine()–the standard method of writing to the console window–by default will not work from a WinForms application. That’s because the console window that launched your WinForms application belongs to the cmd.exe process, which is separate from your WinForms application process.
Frequently asked questions, some assembly required.
This multi-part article answers common questions about assemblies–the basic building blocks of .NET applications. Some developers may never need to understand assemblies. But if you create shared components, use DLLs or deliver a suite of applications, then it’s essential to understand what .NET assemblies are and how they work.
When you attempt to add an assembly reference to a Visual Studio project, the Add Reference dialog appears with a list of registered global assemblies in the .NET tab:
Unfortunately, adding your assembly to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) does NOT make it automatically appear in the Visual Studio list of installed assemblies; you must add your assembly manually as follows:
Sometimes you need to know which version of an assembly was loaded by your .NET application. The following code snippet makes it easy:
