This will be the last post from here. New blog location will be https://lautzofdotnet.wordpress.com/

This almost seems to be a running joke around my house.  Just about the only time I update my company blog is this end of year review I do.  To me this is at least useful.  I’ve found that putting my thoughts for the previous year down on the proverbial paper and expressing my hopes for the new year help me get focused, at least in the short term, to start my year off right.  So here we go, I’m sure everyone (at least all two of you) are anxiously awaiting to read what I have to write.

Recap of 2010 (last years post)

• I wanted to honor God each and every day.  While some days are better than others, I don’t think I’ve forgotten where my blessings flow from. 
• I wanted to become a better father and husband.  Again, I struggle at times to be patient with my children and to honor and love my wife like she deserves, but I can say that they are the most important thing that God has given to me.  This world can take my house, my car and my dog away, but nothing can never take my family from me.  I love each one of my four children more each and every day.  My wife has become my anchor and her strength and love for me gives me the strength and will to move forward each and every day.
• I mentioned last year that I had a tool idea that I wanted to develop.  To be honest, I don’t even remember what that tool was.  However, we have in development now a  new product that we plan to market towards our manufacturing clients (at least initially) and then expand beyond that down the road.  I hope to have something to announce on that within the next month or so.
• Last year I read over 40 books.  This year I hit 50 so I’m quite proud of that.  Not as many work related ones as I would have liked, but nonetheless I’m happy with my achievement. 
• At the beginning of 2010 (as I’ve done every year), I vowed to blog more.  Well that failed miserable as you can tell. 
• I wanted to become more reliant and move towards becoming debt-free.  Don’t think I’ve made any progress there unfortunately, however circumstances have dictated that I need to focus on that more and more and my wife and I have made a commitment to strive towards those goals and have begun to make progress on that in the last quarter of 2010.
• Finally, I wanted to work towards expanding and growing Malachi Computer.  While the first half of 2010 moved slow in this regards, we’ve really begun to make great strides in this area and have picked up a few new clients and a number of new projects in the last quarter of 2010.  We have also begun a heavy push in marketing the business and being more proactive in communicating with our existing clients and reaching out to new ones. 

Where do we headed in 2011? In the past I’ve mixed personal goals and business goals here on this list.  My personal goals change little from year to year, so aside from the first and primary goal of my life, my personal goals will go unstated here.

• Again, as every year, my primary goal in life and in business is to honor God in all we do.  Conduct our business and life as if we were working for Jesus Christ.  Make my family a priority in my life, for without them, I want little else.
• I won’t promise to blog more, but look for a new look to the Malachi Computer website and making the blog an important part of our marketing strategy.
• I’ve also created a new blog that I’m really enjoying writing for.  Not business or computer related, but a topic of importance to me.  I look to move it from it’s current host and make an effort to have it to reach more people.
• Continue to strive to market Malachi Computer in a number of ways.  We are solidifying the services we offer and moving to be more proactive in marketing those services to new and existing clients.  Our focus this year (and really the last quarter of 2010) was to become the solution provider for our customers.  Our customers have problems or inefficiencies and we want to be there to provide a solution for them.  We are really excited about some of things we are seeing that we can do for our clients and looking forward to expanding that out to our entire customer base and beyond.

2010 was not a great year, but I look and see that I still have my health, my family and I’m still working.  Perhaps business has been slow and things have been tight (but really who hasn’t been in the boat this year?), but we are still blessed beyond comprehension.  I look for 2011, with the grace of God, to be a productive and exciting year.  God bless everyone of you that may read this post and to all my friends, colleagues and clients.  May everyone of you be blessed in 2011!

This was a tricky bug I ran into recently.  First a bit of back history.  I’m working on a largish win-forms MDI application.  Early on in the development I received the  exception “Error creating window handle”  when trying to show the MDI child.  I’m using a 3rd party tab control and I originally thought it was a bug in there.  I found a work-around that if I switched back to the first tab (tab index 0) before showing the new child, the error seemed to go away.  For many months, this worked fine.  Recently I went through a bit of refactoring of the application and suddenly this bug reappeared despite my hack.   Well to make  a long story short some more research ensued and I found the fix (hopefully the true fix now)…actually it is a bit of workaround as well, but we’ll just have to live with it for now.  It appears that .NET MDI applications hates a maximized child window.  To bring another tab to the front, it has to restore the active child window from the maximized state, which triggers the forms layout method to re-layout the form.  This causes a series of events (not interested in digging too deep) that basically seems to create your form twice causing a NullReference exception at some point.  More details here. 

Some code that might help me in the future:

    public void DisplayChild(Form child) {
      bool max = false;
      if (this.ActiveMdiChild != null && this.ActiveMdiChild.WindowState == FormWindowState.Maximized) {
        this.ActiveMdiChild.WindowState = FormWindowState.Normal;
        max = true;
      }
      child.MdiParent = this;
      child.Show();
      if (max) child.WindowState = FormWindowState.Maximized;
    }

I ran into a situation where I needed to know what control was gaining focus in the Leave() event of another control.  The situation I was working with is as follows;  I have a multi-line text box that when it gains focus I want a listview of potential values to popup below it.  When the textbox loses focus, the listview should be hidden.   The user should be able to click on the listview to select items to input into the textbox.  The problem was when the user clicked on the listview, the textbox lost focus and was hiding the listview. 

Enter the ActiveControl property on the form.  This handy property allows me to check, in the Leave() event, what is the new active control with focus.  Thus I can check to see if the textbox lost the focus to the listview control and if so, skip the hiding of it. 

Here we have the textbox named txtComplaint, when it gets the focus we make listView visible.

private void txtComplaint_Enter(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
  listView.Visible = true;
}

When the textbox loses focus we see if the ActiveControl is the listView, if not we hide it.

private void txtComplaint_Leave(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
  if (ActiveControl.Name != "listView")
    treeComplaint.Visible = false;
}

Thought it was about time I start these back up.  Simply a few links I find interesting, perhaps some short brief thoughts that don’t necessarily deserve their own post, or whatever tidbits I may find interesting.

• I hate nulls, I hate checking for them, I hate having to muddy my code up testing for null.  In code that I write I try to avoid return nulls as much as possible.  John Sonmez seems to agree with me in this nice article.
• I love enums… I love using them, I love the readability they give me… I love the aspect of limiting my choices on values so I don’t have to worry about bad values, I love not having to check for nulls…I could go on, but it seems once again John Sonmez agrees with me.  Read his article.
• I love var….ok, that is an exaggeration….I do like it though.  Resharper suggests strongly that I use it (by default anyway), so I got in the habit of doing so.  I’m not extreme, I only use it when the type of the variable is evident from surrounding code.  Yes, here again John writes and speaks of his conversion to the var side.
• jQuery is just cool.  The plugins people create are incredible.   Here is a cool one I found today, jQuery Circulate.   That’s one I just want to find a use for.

Well here I am again, if I blog nothing else each year, I have always opened the year with a post to reflect on the past year and to look ahead to next.  Let’s take a look at 2009 and see what my goals were and see how I ended up.

Recap of 2009 (Last Years Post)

• Last year I stated I wanted to become more Christ like and to become a better father and husband.  Not sure how well I succeeded in that, guess you’ll have to ask my wife and kids.  I do know that I love my wife and kids more and more each day.  And while I falter like any human and don’t always show it like I should, my love for Christ has not lessened.
• Last year I stated I refused to participate in a recession.  Well I think I’ve succeeded in that to a degree.  Business has been great, perhaps better this year than in recent history.  On the other hand, I’ve been more careful with my purchases and have been hesitant to make any purchases beyond the essentials.  I think this stems from the uncertainty of where our current administration is leading us more than anything.
• I wanted to develop more tools and products – well I’ve failed miserably there.  No progress at all on this, though in the last few months I’ve come up with some ideas that might actually work (we’ve all said that haven’t we.)
• In 2009 I wanted to read more.  In that, I have more than exceeded my expectations.  I typically read between 20-30 books each year, mostly fiction with a few non-fiction sprinkled in.   In 2009, I finished the year with 42 (if I counted correctly) So I’m quite happy.  To see the books I’ve read (as well as my buddy Todd) go to www.wordsforwords.com.
• I vowed to blog more in 2009.  I’ve failed miserably there, other than my increased book reviews due to my reading 42 books.
• I wanted to get my wife started in a business.   Well, that didn’t work out so well either.  The idea we had just never got out of the idea stage.  The good news is, it didn’t cost us anything and very little time was invested.
• I wanted to continue to get in shape.  Well I failed miserably there as well.  I put on the 30 pounds that I lost in 2008 and failed to follow through with my marathon hopes.

In general however, I did enjoy 2009 much better than 2008 and it was a very good year.  Anyone who knows us knows that are children are very involved in sports.  I got to see my oldest son play varsity football as a freshman (limited Friday night time, but did start on the JV team), my second son had a good year in his first year of tackle football and his team made it to the championship game (which we lost, but we were very proud of the team), youngest son too young for sports yet, but becoming quite the little person.  Our daughter was involved in competition dance the first part of the year and did quite well and has the trophies to prove it.  We did pull her off the team this year because of the financial and time commitments was just too great for the family.

Looking forward to 2010 – my goals for 2010 are much the same as they are every year.

• As always my number one priority above all else is to honor God each every day, as well as becoming the husband and father that my family needs.
• Continue to grow and expand my business.  We have some great plans here that are already in the works.  I hope that this time next year I can come back to you and report success.
• I do have an idea for a tool that not only would I use every day in my work, but may just be something I can make a little from.
• I read 40+ books in 2009, I want to at least stay at that level if not exceed it.  I do have some work related  books that I want to read as well this year to expand my knowledge in my field.
• Ok, ok….I’ll say it again.  Blog more.
• Get myself in shape and improve my healthy lifestyle (or start living one at least)
• I’ll get slight political here….I want to work towards bringing our nation out of the mess it is in and work towards restoring our republic.  Return our nation to one where the constitution mattered and people worked hard to achieve what they obtain…I feel we’ve moved away from what made this nation great over the last year and I want to work in my own small way to restore that.  End of my political rant.
• I want to become more self-reliant.  What do I mean by this?  Well garden more, raising my own crops and livestock (starting with chickens – have one already), and putting more food up by canning, freezing or whatever.  Here’s a great magazine / website I’ve found with lots of great articles to help towards this goal.
• Work towards becoming debt free.

I’m sure there are goals here that I will not succeed at or at least not to the level I may have hoped, but I always feel goals are worth having.  If you set your sights high and work towards that, then even if you only make it halfway, you’ve at least moved closer.

God bless you all and here’s hoping that you all have an awesome 2010.

We're meeting for Code and Coffee at the Canton Arabica tomorrow (Friday) at 7am. We trying to move quickly through Ruby Koans.