C# Discussion Boards - CodeProject

12-Jan-04 15:18

Could somebody give me a smidge of help with the System.Windows.Forms.MonthCalendar class? Or at least point me to some good tutorials using it.

All I'm trying to do at this point is this:
After a user has selected some dates in it, I'd like to go through the entire range of dates (or at least a reasonable portion) and get all selected dates that the user selected. I want to store those dates into an array of DateTime objects.

Any help or pointers? Thanks.

There are only 10 types of people in this world....those that understand binary, and those that do not.

Heath Stewart13-Jan-04 3:41

13-Jan-04 3:41

You can use the SelectionRange (or the SelectionStart and SelectionEnd properties) to iterate between the start and end dates. You cold either temporarily add these to a growable ArrayList, or calculate the number of elements a DateTime[] array would require. The following uses the latter method:

TimeSpan span = monthCal.SelectionEnd - monthCal.SelectionStart;
int count = span.Days + 1; // Subtraction of days requires that you add 1.
DateTime[] dts = new DateTime[count];
for (int i=0; i<count; i++)
  dts[i] = monthCal.SelectionStart + new TimeSpan(1, 0, 0, 0);

KingTermite13-Jan-04 4:27

13-Jan-04 4:27

Thanks for the reply. That looks fairly straightforward. I'm not familiar with the TimeSpan class (yet), but it looks relatively straightwforward.

But this allows me to traverse it....is there anything in that TimeSpan class that lets me see whether the date in question is selected (highlighted in the control) or not?

There are only 10 types of people in this world....those that understand binary, and those that do not.

Heath Stewart13-Jan-04 4:37

13-Jan-04 4:37

The TimeSpan structure - not class (read the SDK documentation for more details) - just represents a difference in relation to a DateTime. The MonthCalendar class only exposes a SelectionStart and SelectionEnd date (the SelectionRange only contains these two properties as well). The TimeSpan has nothing to do with this. See the MonthCalendar documentation in the .NET Framework SDK for more details.

KingTermite13-Jan-04 5:43

13-Jan-04 5:43

Yes, I see how I could use that to select a certain day, but how from there can I tell if that day has been selected/highlighted by the user? I've gone through documentation and this is my primary problem.

Thanks though. Smile | :)

There are only 10 types of people in this world....those that understand binary, and those that do not.

Heath Stewart13-Jan-04 5:50

13-Jan-04 5:50

As I keep saying, you must iterate through the dates between the MonthCalendar.SelectionStart and MonthCalendar.SelectionEnd dates. That snippet of code I posted the first time does this. The TimeSpan merely adds i days to the SelectionState DateTime and adds that to the array. The SelectionRange is contiquous to simply iterating inclusively between the SelectionStart and SelectionEnd dates is how you get an array of the selected dates.

KingTermite13-Jan-04 6:02

13-Jan-04 6:02

How exactly, then, is it determining if the date was selected/highlighted? That snipped just appears to go through all the dates. Does the SelectionRange only give dates that were selected?

BTW....I'm at work now and unable to play with the code in question ("my own" code at home)....so I'm going by memory (e.g. code is not in front of me). That's why I'm unable to put this in and test and see what you mean.

There are only 10 types of people in this world....those that understand binary, and those that do not.

Heath Stewart13-Jan-04 6:47

13-Jan-04 6:47

As I've mentioned a couple times now, the SelectionRange is inclusive, meaning that every date between MonthCalendar.SelectionStart and MonthCalendar.SelectionEnd is selected. Unless there's some undocumented feature of the MonthCalendar or you've extended and overridden its behavior, this is how the MonthCalendar works - a single date range can be selected.

Now, if you want to track every selection the user makes, handle the MonthCalendar.DateSelected event and add the range from DateRangeEventArgs.Start and DateRangeEventArgs.End to an ArrayList or something, which you can later use ArrayList.CopyTo to create an array from the list.

KingTermite15-Jan-04 14:49

15-Jan-04 14:49

I've got it now and am only posting it here now for posterity. I must have been pretty tired when I worked on it last because it was right there as obvious as could be. I swear I went through the docs on the MonthCalendar class about 5 times and didn't see what I wanted, but NOW I see there is a property BoldedDates which returns to me an array of DateTime[] of all the dates that are bolded. Which is EXACTLY what I was trying to get.

Why it was so hard, I don't know. Like I said...I must have been tired...it was late last Saturday or Sunday night when I played with it last.

There are only 10 types of people in this world....those that understand binary, and those that do not.

Heath Stewart16-Jan-04 3:42

16-Jan-04 3:42

You never said bolded dates - those are different from selected dates, hence even the different property names. If you had specified that before, I could've told you immediately; of course, if you had looked at the class members like I mentioned you should do before - i.e., read the documentation - it should'be been obvious.

There is a big difference between bolded and selected dates, though.

File Permissions

krisp12-Jan-04 14:54

krisp

12-Jan-04 14:54

Hi all,

I would like to be able to determine at the start of my app if the user has enough permissions for many different files/folders.

I have read articles that discuss calling Win32 API NTFS calls, and Active Directory calls to get ACLs, but this seems like something that I would think would be inside dot net some how. No?

Like something like:

if( File.GetPermissions( "C:\\my cars" ) == FileAccess.Read | FileAccess.Write )
{
// good
}
else
{
MessageBox.Show( "Not enough permissions. );
}

Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks alot for any help you can lend,
Kris.

Jeff Mackie12-Jan-04 17:33

Jeff Mackie

12-Jan-04 17:33

Krisp,

I do not know if this going to help you or not. But System.IO.File.GetAttributes(FileName)returns a file's attributes. Typical Attributes are Archive, ReadOnly and hidden, I am sure there is more.

Hope this helps!

krisp12-Jan-04 17:36

krisp

12-Jan-04 17:36

No, that doesn't get any file permissions such as: can the user read/write.

I had looked at that myself as well.

But thanks anyways.

Jeff Mackie12-Jan-04 17:48

Jeff Mackie

12-Jan-04 17:48

Thats ok, I was reading this on an other site. It deals with permissions.

http://www.codeguru.com/cs_misc/Security.html

Heath Stewart13-Jan-04 2:57

How can I use the Cabinet.dll in c#

13-Jan-04 2:57

No, there is currently nothing in the .NET base class library that deals with NTFS permissions. There may be some third-party libraries out there and I'm sure "Longhorn" will introduce such encapsulation, but you either have to use the NTFS APIs or try to write a zero-byte file to the directory and catch any exceptions that are thrown.

For more discussion about alternatives, please click the "Search Comments" link above. We have covered this in the past. There are also a few articles here on the CP web site. Use the search text box toward the top of the page (below the logo).

aw1ay12-Jan-04 14:32

aw1ay

12-Jan-04 14:32

Re: How can I use the Cabinet.dll in c#

Heath Stewart13-Jan-04 2:52

Re: How can I use the Cabinet.dll in c#

13-Jan-04 2:52

By P/Invoking the functions you need. See DllImportAttribute for more information. It would also be best to encapsulate this into a nice class or classes. It will give you and your clients a better object-oriented approach to dealing with CAB files.

aw1ay13-Jan-04 15:52

aw1ay

13-Jan-04 15:52

what is the corrsponed type in C# that means the type void* in C++

Re: How can I use the Cabinet.dll in c#

Heath Stewart14-Jan-04 3:22

passing data to installer class

14-Jan-04 3:22

IntPtr. You should also read about interoperability in .NET in the .NET Framework SDK, as well as understand what the intrinsic types are. In .NET, this is pretty easy because the bit size is part of the Type name, like Int32 is 32 bits. Knowing what the types are in the Win32 APIs isn't always so easy, but looking at the data types in the Platform SDK at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/winprog/winprog/windows_data_types.asp[^] can help, especially if you have the Platform SDK installed so that you can search the headers for the typedef (personally, I use gvim.exe (Graphical Vi IMproved) with tag files created by ctags.exe).

econnor12-Jan-04 11:07

econnor

12-Jan-04 11:07

I have a .net/C# project that prompts the user for a couple of parameters during installation. These parameters are then passed to an installer class as a custom action which validates this data before letting installation complete.

I am now trying to do a silent installation deployment of the application and want the user to type in these parameters as command line arguments. I have played around with msiexec.exe and how to install .msi files under silent mode. That being said, I cannot figure out how to pass command-line data to a custom action that is an installer class (!) Before I was just using the CustomActionData property and feeding in the parameters that way - but having trouble now trying to do this from the command line. Anyone have any advice? Thanks.

Heath Stewart13-Jan-04 2:45

13-Jan-04 2:45

Add a secure public property (all capital letters and added to the semi-colon-delimited list of the SecureProperties property) to your installer project and use that public property (using the square brackets, [PROPERTY]) as the value for the param(s) of your Installer class. A user can then use msiexec.exe /i ... Package.msi /PROPERTY=Value. I use this for our installation and it works great. You should also consider giving this property a default value as well.

The only real problem is that the Windows Installer project for VS.NET is very lacking. You'll either need to use a real development environment like Wise for Windows Installer or the very expensive InstallShield DevStudio, or download the Windows Installer SDK from http://msdn.microsoft.com/platformsdk[^] and install the Orca.msi package to obtain Orca - perhaps one of the best tools for MSI developers and AD administrators! Just open your compiled MSI package in that and add the property to the Property table post-build. You can use that same property name in your Custom Action command line for your Installer class at design-time, though.

econnor13-Jan-04 3:58

econnor

13-Jan-04 3:58

Thanks Heath - appreciate it. I will take a look at Orca as well.

econnor13-Jan-04 5:40

econnor

13-Jan-04 5:40

I cannot find the SecureProperties property?!? I searched the documentation as well and do not see anything about it... can you give me some direction?

Heath Stewart13-Jan-04 5:43