Google has the motto ‘Do No Evil’ when it comes to corporate practices. Only time will tell if they can stick to this policy as they continue to grow into the future. One company that has definitely crossed the line, in my opinion, is website company Network Solutions.

If you use Network Solutions to check if a domain is available they immediately go ahead and register it for themselves. They keep it registered for 5 days and during that period if you visit the proposed domain you will see their page offering to sell it to you for $39.95. They claim this is a ‘service’ for their customers as it reserves if for them to buy and prevents squatters getting it during those five days.

Obviously this explanation if nonsense. During that 5 days it can be bought by anyone that contacts Networks Solutions and not just the person who made the search. Hence it might not help the searcher at all. Plus during those 5 days you are forced to buy it via Network Solutions at a cost of $39.95 which is much more expensive than other registrars. If you really wanted the domain you would probably go ahead and buy it from them in order to prevent the risk of it being acquired by someone else once the 5 days is up.

UPDATE: Here are news links
DomainNews Story
Wikipedia & Issue
Digg Story
Reddit Comments

If your interested in the business side of software, and in particular working as a MicroISV, then you need to check out this blog. It has some online videos of the excellent speakers as the October 2007 Business of Software conference. Watch the one by Eric Sink of SourceGear fame as it has some handy tips on marketing for developers.

http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/

To make it easy for KryptonRibbon developers to use the new color menu item I have added a couple of new elements. One is used inside the button cluster and the other within the triple and lines containers. Here you can see examples of both in action….

There are several points to note. First of all the color button is just an extension of the existing button element and so everything you can do with buttons you can also do with color buttons. So you can make the button a Push, Check, DropDown or Split type depending on your application requirements.

Use the SelectedColor property to define the current color of the element. You can see in the above image that a portion of the element image has a solid block of color drawn to indicate the selected color. This is drawn automatically for you. As the user selects new colors, or you programmatically alter the selection, this block will be updated.

Of course, you might decide this default block size and position are not appropriate for you. No problem, just alter the SelectedRect property to indicate where you would prefer it to be drawn. This image shows the top entry with the default rectangle but the ones below have been modified to different values…

Note that the color block is drawn over the top of the image so you will want to synchronize the image and block position so they complement each other.

There are some cases where you might want to allow the specification of no color at all. In this case you just assign the Color.Empty value to the SelectedColor property. The user can do this using the ‘No Color’ entry in the context menu as seen in the first image above. A Color.Empty value is not drawn as a solid block because it would result in nothing being drawn! Instead a border is drawn around the color area using the EmptyBorderColor. This picture shows just this scenario for two of the color buttons.

There are various other properties for controlling which entries are shown in the context menu but I will not list them all here. Suffice it to say that you can customize the look using just design time properties to work in a reasonable way for most application needs. If that is still not enough you can hook into the DropDown event and completely alter the context menu contents as you please.

If you have not already heard of it then I recommend you check out the useful Visual Studio visualizer called Mole. This is a handy tool that is available when you are in the debugger of you .NET application. It works with WinForms as well as WPF applications.

Mole Homepage
Mole Silverlight Videos
http://karlshifflett.wordpress.com/mole-for-visual-studio/

Mole Authors Blog
http://karlshifflett.wordpress.com/

Most applications have a requirement to let the user select a color. This is the purpose of the new KryptonContextMenuColorColumns item that is used with the KryptonContextMenu.  Below you can see a context menu that has four instances of the new item, with a heading above each item giving a description of the enum used to define the colors…

The last two instances present the colors as seem in Office 2007 applications allowing you to closely mimic those style of apps. The first three are simpler sets of colors that I think will be commonly required.

You are not forced into using the predefined color sets, instead you can provide your own set of colors, although you need to do this in code by calling a method. Also configurable are the size of the individual color blocks and the placement of rows…

There are two events generated by the item, SelectedColorChanged is fired when the user selects a color block and TrackColor is fired as you move the mouse, or keyboard, over different items. Use TrackColor if you want to provide a live update of how a change will look if that item is selected.

If you want to help decide how the rest of the implementation should proceed then add a comment on the following two issues…

- Are there any other color sets you would like predefined?
- Is there some standard implementation you would like?

For example, would you like a predefined context menu that already has full color selection functionality built in, like the context menu that appears when you click the Font Color button in Word 2007? If so then what functionality should be present and what would need to be optional?