Setting the Default Printer in .NET

 
The following C# code shows how to use WMI to query printers information, set and get default printer.
public bool SetDefaultPrinter()
{
    System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher search = 
default(System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher); System.Management.ManagementObjectCollection results =
default(System.Management.ManagementObjectCollection); System.Management.ManagementObject printer =
default(System.Management.ManagementObject); search =
new System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher("select * from win32_printer"); results = search.Get(); //Get Default Printer System.Management.ManagementObject defaultPrinter = null; foreach (System.Management.ManagementObject foundPrinter in results) { System.Management.PropertyDataCollection
propertyDataCollection = foundPrinter.Properties; if ((bool)foundPrinter["Default"]) // DEFAULT PRINTER { System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(foundPrinter["Name"]); System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(foundPrinter["Location"]); } } //Sets new default Printer foreach (System.Management.ManagementObject foundPrinter in results) { System.Diagnostics.Debug.Print(foundPrinter["Name"].ToString()); if (foundPrinter["Name"].Equals("PDFCreator")) { System.Management.ManagementBaseObject outParams =
foundPrinter.InvokeMethod("SetDefaultPrinter", null, null); if (outParams == null) System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("Unable to set default printer"); Int32 retVal = (int)(uint)outParams.Properties["ReturnValue"].Value; if (retVal == 0) return true; else return false; } } return false; }

Control Property Serialization in .NET

While solving a bug with a custom class that extended the System.Data.DataSet class, I found a situation where the class implemented, the ISerializable interface, but for some reason, during the call to the base.GetObjectData in my serialization code it was trying to get the value of some properties that caused an exception.

The reason was that those properties were not “ready” because my serialization code had not finish initializing the object. But why was the Dataset.GetObjectData trying to get or set those values.

It seems that there is some code in the dataset that used reflection to get the object properties and try to serialize them. I did not want that.
How could I stop the framework from doing that?


I thought of the NonSerializable attribute but that works only on fields and what I have is a property.

I thought of the XmlIgnore attribute but it had no effect.

Why!!!!

Well I finally found that you can add a couple of (not attributes) methods to your component.

They should be named Reset<Property>() and ShouldSerialize<Property>() and returning a boolean value
from these functions will control if the properties are serialized or not.

For more info see MSDN page for ShouldSerialize

Migration from .NET Framework 1.1

13. August 2009 18:07 by Mrojas in General  //  Tags: , , , , , ,   //   Comments (0)

.NET has been around for quite a while. According Wikipedia it has been around since on 3 April 2003
So now there exist applications developed for .NET Framework 1.0 or 1.1 and people
need to migrate them to Framework 2.0 or Framework 3.5.

It is the general impression that there is not a direct path to 3.5.
As Zain Naboulsi explains in his blog you can go from 1.1 to 2.0 then from 2.0 to 3.5.
And From 2.0 to 3.5 the migration is a no-brainer because, both, 3.0 and 3.5 are based on 2.0.

A good reference also is the post of Peter Laudati on migration from 1.1 to 2.0.
Note: Peter’s post seem to have a broken link to the microsoft document about breaking changes in 2.0.
The correct link is this.

A more recent post by The Moth provides more links to breaking changes documents:

- Design time Breaking Changes in .NET Framework 2.0
- Runtime Breaking Changes in .NET Framework 2.0
- Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 and 2.0 Compatibility
- Compatibility Testing Scenarios

Going from 1.1 to 2.0 or 3.5 can be just as simple as opening the solution in VS and compile
or it can take a lot of effort. Web Projects then to be more difficult due to several changes in ASP.NET.

So good luck.

Tools?

Well there a lot of static analyisis tools we have used
(some internal, some from Third Parties. I particulary like Understand and NDepend)