Code Snippets

The Kailua Project - The forgotten methods in the ADO.NET API

Moved to: Windward Wrocks

WindwardTimeZone

Thank you to Michael Brumn who's SimpleTimeZone class does most of what I have here. My additions are to provide a canonical name for each known timezone and converting it to C#.

WindwardTimeZone

The WindwardTimeZone class will give you a TimeZone object for any timezone in the Windows registry. Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003, and Vista all have every timezone on the planet in their registry in the tests I have done. I have checked English, German, and Chinese Windows and all store the key in English using the exact same text. So this should work on any version/locale of Windows.

WindwardTimeZone.Key is a string and is the canonical name you should store. This class is designed to give you the current timezone and to give you the timezone for any given key. It is not designed to give you a list of all timezones but that could easily be added.

We use this in the Windward Arrow and with this we set our scheduling so that a user says they want a report to run at say 9:30 am Mountain time. And that report will then run at 9:30 am Mountain Time regardless of when daylight savings time starts and stops. We store this as 9:30 Mountain Time, not as the UTC time with a time shift and therefore we have no problems if there is a change in when daylight savings time starts/stops.

Code here: WindwardReports.com
Support forum: Windward Studios forums

RibbonX in a Word AddIn

If you want to add RibbonX support to your Word AddIn, it is actually pretty easy.

1. Read Patrick Schmid's article on adding IRibbonExtensibility to your IDTExtensibility2 class. Very straightforward.
2. Read Eric Faller's article on the code to put in your AddIn to get RibbonX functionality. You mainly want to read Part II.
3. Read Frank Rice's and Ken Getz's article on using the Ribbon. This gives you a lot more detail.
4. Part 2 (next in TOC) of Frank/Ken's article lists the RibbonX xml schema.

Patrick's article gives you exactly what to do for the shim. However, for a very simple starter program, here is a working example (note WindwardBear is the namespace for my AddIn):

...
[GuidAttribute("3F7440C9-FA66-4424-859D-B49799CCA96A"), ProgId("AutoTag2007.Connect")]
[ComVisible(true)]
public class Connect : Object, IDTExtensibility2, IRibbonExtensibility, IDisposable
{

  public string GetCustomUI(string RibbonID)
  {
   Assembly assembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();
            Stream stream = assembly.GetManifestResourceStream("WindwardBear.customui.xml");
   StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(stream);

   return reader.ReadToEnd();
  }

  public void DoSomething(IRibbonControl button)
  {
   NativeMethods.TopMostMessageBox(GetParent(), "DoSomething " + button, "AutoTag Ctor", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Information);
  }
...

customui.xml which is in the project root directory and it's build action is "Embedded Resource":

<customUI xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2006/01/customui">
  <ribbon>
    <officeMenu>
      <button id="AutoTag"
             label="Auto Tag 1"
            onAction="DoSomething"/>
    </officeMenu>
    <tabs>
      <tab id="AutoTagTab"
     label="Auto Tag 2"
     visible="true">
        <group id="EditingTools"
        label="Editing Tools">
          <button id="ClearTimecard"
       label="Clear Timecard"
       size="large"
       onAction="DoSomething"/>
        </group>
      </tab>
    </tabs>
  </ribbon>
</customUI>

Do you find this useful? If so please check out Windward Reports.