Develop Reference

How does this line make my console application beep?

Came across this by accident. Can someone please explain why this gives a beep?
while (true)
{
Console.WriteLine(Encoding.Default.GetString(BitConverter.GetBytes(7)));
}

Because that's the Bell code.
A bell code (sometimes bell character) is a device control code originally sent to ring a small electromechanical bell on tickers and other teleprinters and teletypewriters to alert operators at the other end of the line, often of an incoming message.
It's an old hack to make certain devices make noise when certain parts of a message are received (like, say the start or end). Your computer happens to be one of the devices that make a noise when that character is printed.

That's the bell character (alt 7).
Console.WriteLine("•")(alt + num-7) would also make a beep. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_character

This come from a long time ago,
We use character codes for both control and data streams.
In the standar ascii charset, the 0x07 char is bell, this mandates to the receiver system to beep or alert to te user.
Other well know control codes are 0x10 and 0x13 (Line feed and carriage return, [in your screen and in printers])
Most of these are not noticeable and prints as an single icon o character, but your 0x07 char is a very special control code ;)

How to Type Multilingual Characters in Windows Mobile Device by Device Keypad

I have a smart device with windows Mobile 6.5 operating system, and i want to write an application for this device by .Net CF 3.5 and C# Language. The keybpad of this device is something look like this picture:
As you see in the top picture, texts and numbers are placed on the same key. For example 2 has “ABC” if we wanted to write anything starting with ‘A’ we need to type key 2 once. If we wanted to type ‘B’, press key 2 twice and thrice for typing ‘C’.
Q1. I can not type English letters using this keyboard, I just can type digits. I want to type English letters in text boxes (And to Persian letters). Can I do this job by keybd_event() that is an extern function ?
Q2. I have 3 method for input characters and at the same time one of these methods must be enabled :
Type digits
Type English letters (with some characters like . , ? / )
Type Persian Letters (with some characters like . , ? / )
In other hands in How to switch between the three methods
Q3. how to show keyboard by appropriate characters according to one of 3 input methods that described? (One time with English, another time with Persian, and another time with digits)
Regards

If the special key interpretation is only needed inside one application (Compact Framework) then possibly using SDF (SmartDeviceFramework) is the coice. See KeyTest3AKsdf on http://www.hjgode.de/wp/2012/09/20/windows-mobile-cf-how-to-catch-f1-and-f2-in-weh/
In the Message Handler you need to manage the keyboard plane (numbers, english letters, persian letters) and probably a key-pressed timeout to be able to decide if a key is pressed multiple times within a time (to produce these ABC optional outputs).
Define a key or combination to switch between the planes.
Watch the messages coming in and decide what to do. You can alter a copy of the message, post it to the message queue and return true to let windows system know that you handled the message.
You may use keybd_event for simple keys as defined in winuser.h and winuserm.h. But for extended chars this will get complicated (finding the right sequence of values). I would go with PostMessage and WM_CHAR for extended symbols and letters.
Further on you may need to install a trueype font with persian glyphs. The default english OS fimrware normally only support a subset of unicode glyphs. See also http://www.hjgode.de/wp/2011/04/06/mobile-development-a-simple-unicode-character-map/

Font unicode glyph mapping to actual characters

I'm trying to display all glyphs in a font. I'm using GetFontUnicodeRanges to get the available characters, then I create a bitmap with all the available characters and their index next to each one.
I used the font "Wingdings 2" as a test case, and compared it to what I see in Windows' charmap.exe. I see that while all the characters appear, some characters appear more than once (total of 480 glyphs in that non-unicode font), and the positions are not the same as in charmap (for instance, medium sized circle glyph, in charmap located as 0x97, and in the font it is glyph 0xF097 and I also think it is the one in 0x2014).
I want to use the font as the "regular" way, meaning, I want to see the same data as in charmap.exe (and in a side note I would also like to know if a font is a unicode font or ascii font, as charmap shows). Basically, you can say I am trying to write my own charmap from scratch.
How can I fill in that missing data? I was looking through the Windows' fonts and text APIs, but couldn't find anything to help me, so I must be missing some relevant APIs. What are they?

After struggling a lot with GetFontData and the lack of documentation (well, not exactly lack of, but it is really not well organized, and some data is indeed missing), I found a way writing my own CharMap. Here's what I've found during development:
The documentation will tell you to use a "trick" possible since the glyph location data comes right after the arrays in cmap table. It doesn't mean it is IN the cmap table. Actually, they are in the loca table.
You would also need to read the head table for the location format flag (offset 34), and the maxp table for the number of glyphs field (offset 4).
It seems that in symbol fonts (you can tell if a font is a symbol font if the cmap header encoding id is 0, at least in TTF format 4, which is the Microsoft format) the characters are added 0xF000 to their actual index, so instead of the regular ASCII codes, you get a Unicode value in the far end of the Unicode table. I subtracted 0xF000 from each character code and tested on Wingdings[2,3] and Webdings fonts and it worked just fine.
I used the official documentation a lot: www.microsoft.com/typography/tt/ttf_spec/ttch02.doc, and the reference code: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/241020.
The reference code is written in C, so in order to write it in C# I read all the data to byte[] buffers, and "manually" read each element from it.

I went through this nightmare years ago too and I know a lot about all this stuff now. I figured I should pitch in and provide some answers.
1) You can not assume that 'loca' is following the 'cmap'. The order can vary by font. The location of each block is defined by the OffsetTable which begins generally at byte 0 of the font file. (http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/otff.htm)
2) You can not assume that "cmap header encoding id is 0, at least in TTF format 4" means symbol fonts. I know for a fact that certain old arabic fonts also use that encoding. To this date, I still do not know how to differentiate them. Windows does it but I do not know how. I do not know how to know for sure that a font is a symbol font. Even checking the OS/2 table for the code page bit 32 isn't enough in many case.
3) You can not simply use the magic 0xF000 number and add it to your small 0-255 number to get the character that will give you the glyph mapping you are going for. That is because those small 0 to 255 "ASCII" code will vary depending on your system locale.
Symbol font are specials in the way that windows processes them.
Unlike normal font where the mapping between glyphs and character is static, symbol fonts mapping varies based on the system default code page for non-unicode application aka CP_ACP.
For example, Pretend your symbol font have this glyph : '%'. If your system is using CP 1252 by default, then to render this glyph you, for example, have to render the character value '0xC2'.
If your system is using CP 1251 by default, then to render this glyph you, for example, have to render the character value '0x416' which is entirely different.
Said otherwise, the font's unicode ranges varies based on the default non-unicode code page!
After investigation, we discovered that the valid character value for fonts are the values obtained by converting 0 through 255 are if they were CP_ACP value to unicode.
What does this mean? This means that you want to use MultiByteToWideChar with CP_ACP to get the mapping from values 0 to 255 to their localized unicode value based on your system locale (CP_ACP).
So, doing that will give you a map like :
ASCII -> localized non-static UNICODE
0x00 -> 0x00
0x01 -> 0x01
0x02 -> 0x02
...
0xC2 -> 0x416 <----- This is correct : the value will be different in some cases.
...
0xE3 -> 0xE3
The 0xF000 to 0xF0FF values are the static UNICODE values : they never change.
So to get the glyph ID for a "localized non-static UNICODE", you first use your map above to find the corresponding ASCII value and then you add 0xF000 to that and then you get the glyph id for that.
Of course, non of this non-sense is documented by MS... or I could never find it.

I've never looked at "WingDings 2" in detail, but it's very common for glyphs to be reused for different characters. For example, uppercase Roman A and uppercase Greek alpha are frequently the same glyph.
However, I guess the equality of 0x97, 0xF097 and 0x2014 is some kind of hack to deal with windows-1252. In the windows-1252 codepage, 0x97 is an em-dash, which is 0x2014 in Unicode. 0xF097 is in the private use area; I guess it is providing a Unicode-compatible (and reversible) way of encoding the windows-1252 0x97.
In my experience, the most reliable way to get an unambiguous list of the unicode characters supported by a font is to parse the cmap table from the ttf file. This is a bit of a chore (cmap supports something like six different encodings) but it is documented online. You can use the GetFontData function to get the raw data, or parse the ttf directly.
charmap uses the GetFontData function and the code includes the string "cmap", suggesting that charmap is also doing this.
The Windows SDK Debugging Tools include logger.exe, which records all the APIs used by an app. You can use this if you want to be really sure what charmap is doing.

How to erase the comma in a calculator when the user has numbers such as 233,232 when they hit the 3 that is on the left of the comma [duplicate]

This question already has an answer here:
Closed 11 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
How to handle when the backspace button is pressed and the input panel has digit grouped numbers. E.g. 434,343,334.232.
Basically the question says it all, I'm making a calculator in c# and I'm stuck on this problem. When digit grouping is hit the numbers get separated by commas, when the user hits the backspace button, the commas act like characters that get deleted.
inputPanelTextBox.Text = inputPanelTextBox.Text.Replace(",", "") I put this piece of code under my backspace click event. The problem is that say the panel has 234,232 and the user presses the backspace button, the comma is gone as well as the 2 on the far right.
What I want to happen is the same way the windows 7 calculator does when the digit grouped menu is checked and the user hits the backspace.
Any idea of how to go about this? Thank you so much in advance.

How about you store the number just as a number then format the number to look nice when you output it. The same thing will work with string.Format(). You could reformat the number into the display string every time the user hits backspace or adds a new digit. There are lots of the string format modifiers listed here.
int numWithComma = 3000;
int numWithoutComma = 50;
Console.WriteLine("numWithComma: {0:n}", numWithComma);
Console.WriteLine("numWithoutComma: {0:n}", numWithoutComma);
// prints:
// numWithComma: 3,000.00
// numWithoutComma: 50.00
If I were making this calculator, I would save the number in a double, then when the number needs to be displayed I would run it through a function like this and display the string to the user:
private static string FormatForDisplay(double number)
{
return string.Format("{0:n}", number);
}

How about using a format string when you output the number, that way you don't have to manage commas at all.
double myDouble = 500000.012345
inputPanelTextBox.Text = myDouble.ToString("N", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
Its been a while since I've used Visual Studio but I'm pretty sure you can set these format strings directly on text boxes so its simply automatically handled when they type. And its easy as pie to set in the properties if I remember correctly. Check out Standard Numeric Format Strings for a bit more on it.
Also a MaskedTextBox might work as well, set the mask to something like "999,999,999,999.99" and see how that formats different numbers.
Good Luck! :D

C# how to do <enter> on barcode?

I have a combination of ItemNo and LotNo value.
Example :
ItemNo: I123
LotNo : L12345
Barcode Value is: "I123L12345"
I want to put the value of ItemNo to txtItemNo.Text and LotNo to txtLotNo.Text
How can I instruct the barcode to do Carriage Return or Enter so that I can be able to input 2 values on one Barcode scan.
My barcode supports CODE 128, CODE 3of9 and CODE 93.
Thanks in advance.

It sounds like you want to have the barcode automatically insert an EnterKey within the scanned value. Although there may be barcode scanners out there that would do this, most will not.
Instead, it's up to your code to recognize that the entered value has two values within it, and to parse them out and disseminate them to their appropriate fields.
For example, if each code starts with a letter, followed by a numeric value, then can walk through the characters, checking for alpha or numeric, and deal with them accordingly.

You can put a TAB character (0x09) between the 2 parts in your barcode and make sure that your text boxes have consecutive TabIndex and AcceptTabs set to false. So when the barcode reader puts the tab into the first text box the focus will move to the second box.

I have worked with Barcodes Readers (Datalogic and Symbol) for almost 3 years and what you are asking is a matter of Barcode Reader Configuration.
You will probably have to read codes from you configuration Chart and set after the BARCODE is read send CR as well.
provide us the Brand and Model and maybe I can help you set that up.
programatically of course that you can listen to the Text Event (on text change) and when you have the Barcode lenght just move the Focus() to other control, or add a NewLine (if it's a Multiline TextBox for example...
private void txtMyBCInput_OnTextChanged(...) {
if(txtMyBCInput.Length >= 13)
txtMyBCInput.Text += System.Environment.NewLine;
}
I tried to send them an email requesting technicall data for your issue, I got this:
Dear Bruno, According to our sales policy, we support our customer
through our local partner. Please let us know where (Company name) your
friend got our device, and I will contact the company to help your
friend. If you have any queries, please let me know.
Thank you!
Sincerely yours,
Julee Lee
Overseas Sales EMEA Division/Sales Manager
Bluebird Soft Inc.
1242 Gaepo-dong, Kangnam-gu, Seoul, Korea
Tel: 82-70-7730-8130 Mobile: 82-10-8876-6564 Fax: 82-2-548-0870
So, please fell free to contact them and ask for this feature :)

This workaround might help :
First , you have to include delimiters to your barcode.
Then use this code (This code assumes the delimiter is '$') :
private void textBox1_TextChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (textBox1.Text.Contains("$"))
{
string[] str_split = textBox1.Text.Split("$".ToCharArray ());
textBox1.Text = str_split[0].ToString ();
textBox2.Text = str_split[1].ToString();
}
}

If you are printing the barcode yourself, you can use Code128 and include a CR, LF, and or TAB in the barcode. BTW, you should take a look at GS1-128, since you are doing something that looks like a proper application of GS1-128. Doing that would allow your business partners to use your barcodes without having to negotiate the format, as long as their software understands GS1-128.