Sometimes it’s important to understand the order of events that occur when a WinForms Form is opened, closed, shown or hidden.  There are also a few “gotchas” that are important to know.

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The C# decimal keyword denotes a 128-bit data type.  Compared to floating-point types, the decimal type has a greater precision and a smaller range, which makes it suitable for financial and monetary calculations.

Approximate Range: ±1.0 × 10−²⁸ to ±7.9 × 10²⁸

Precision:  28-29 significant digits

.NET Type:  System.Decimal

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It’s common UI courtesy to show the Wait cursor when performing a long operation that requires the user to wait.  Here is how the Wait cursor appears in Windows Vista:

But developers often go about this the wrong way by setting the Cursor.Current property as follows:

Cursor.Current = Cursors.WaitCursor;

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Sometimes you may need to display or print an input string that contains binary characters.  The following function replaces all binary characters in a string with a blank.  You can easily modify this method to remove other undesirable characters (such as high-ASCII) if needed.

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Closing all forms in an application seems like it would be a simple task of using a foreach loop in the Application.OpenForms collection, such as:

foreach (Form form in Application.OpenForms)
{
    form.Close();
}

But there are two problems.

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It’s easy to read a string one line at a time.  Here is a console program that demonstrates how:

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It’s fairly easy to convert a C# String to a Stream and vice-versa.

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So you’ve set the ToolTipText property of a TabPage in a TabControl.  When the user moves the mouse pointer over the tab, the text you specified is supposed to show in a tooltip. 

But what if the tooltip is not showing?  Fortunately, this problem has an easy solution:

Set the ShowToolTips property in the TabControl to true.

Many .NET developers are baffled by the lack of a “Clear” method in the StringBuilder class.  For example, if you are using a StringBuilder in a loop, you may want to clear its contents at the beginning of each loop.

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This article explains how to use C# to determine the name, edition, service pack, version and bits of the host operating system.

For example, the results on my PC would be:

Operation System Information
—————————-
Name = Windows Vista
Edition = Home Premium
Service Pack = Service Pack 1
Version = 6.0.6001.65536
Bits = 64

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