Steve Cooper's Personal Blog

I have discovered a neat little hack for topping up you mobile on pay and go. Most companies use a fixed menu system. If your phone allows you to store phone numbers including hashes and pauses, you can create a contact that navigates the menu system like a robot rat. Here is the phone number you use on 02 to top up by £15;

44 44 ,#,1,#,1,#,#,9876#,543#,15#

You’ll need to swap ‘9876’ with the last digits of your debit card, and ‘543’ with the security code on the back. 

If that’s a useful trick and you use another mobile provider or phone, feel free to post your own patterns in the comments. 

I’m learning WPF, very slowly, as a background thing.

I’m working very slowly through some WPF at the moment, and discovered something I thought was really odd. The classic .Net Image class — System.Drawing.Image — can’t be easily databound into the WPF Image control.

That seemed crazy to me — it’s like having a `PictureBox` control without an `Image` property. I resolved to fix it in the most ‘WPFy’ way I could.

What I’d tried was binding a ListView to a list of objects, like so;

Id bound to an object which declares two properties;

string DisplayName { get; }
System.Drawing.Image Image { get; set; }

I wanted to populate a `DataTemplate` but if I did this in my template;

The text appears but the image does not. It turns out that WPF can’t find a suitable converter.

So, thanks to [Reed Copsey](http://reedcopsey.com/) and his very helpful [pointer on Stack Overflow](http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wpf/thread/833ca60f-6a11-4836-bb2b-ef779dfe3ff0/), and [this tutorial](http://www.switchonthecode.com/tutorials/wpf-tutorial-binding-converters), I’ve found a way I’m happy with; one that doesn’t involve c# code-behind.

I’ve created an `IValueConverter` which does the conversion from `System.Drawing.Image` to `System.Windows.Media.ImageSource`. A big thank-you to [Matt Galbraith of Microsoft](http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/profile/matt%20galbraith%20-%20msft) for providing the core code;

using System;
using System.Drawing.Imaging;
using System.Globalization;
using System.IO;
using System.Windows.Data;

namespace System.Windows.Media
{
///

/// One-way converter from System.Drawing.Image to System.Windows.Media.ImageSource
///

[ValueConversion(typeof(System.Drawing.Image), typeof(System.Windows.Media.ImageSource))]
public class ImageConverter : IValueConverter
{
public object Convert(object value, Type targetType,
object parameter, CultureInfo culture)
{
// empty images are empty…
if (value == null) { return null; }

var image = (System.Drawing.Image)value;
// Winforms Image we want to get the WPF Image from…
var bitmap = new System.Windows.Media.Imaging.BitmapImage();
bitmap.BeginInit();
MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream();
// Save to a memory stream…
image.Save(memoryStream, image.RawFormat);
// Rewind the stream…
memoryStream.Seek(0, System.IO.SeekOrigin.Begin);
bitmap.StreamSource = memoryStream;
bitmap.EndInit();
return bitmap;
}

public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType,
object parameter, CultureInfo culture)
{
return null;
}
}
}

Then you need to bring the image converter into XAML as a resource. Add the namespace declaration to the window;

xmlns:med=”clr-namespace:System.Windows.Media”

Stick an instance of the `ImageConverter` into a static resource;

Then you can use it in XAML to bind directly to the Image, using the new converter;

So. A re-usable converter which allows databinding directly to GDI image objects.

Originally discussed [on stack overflow](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3427034/using-xaml-to-bind-to-a-system-drawing-image-into-a-system-windows-image-control)

[http://2tbsp.com/node/100](http://2tbsp.com/node/100) suggests using google trends to judge popularity of ajax libraries; looking at the current data, it looks like jQuery is the clear winner so far in the AJAX library stakes. The current trends can be found [here](http://trends.google.com/websites?q=dojotoolkit.org%2C+jquery.com%2C+prototypejs.org%2C+mootools.net%2C+http%3A%2F%2Fdeveloper.yahoo.com%2Fyui%2F&geo=all&date=all&sort=2)

I get into work anywhere between 8:00am and 9:30am. As the end of the day draws on, I’m sometimes not sure whether I’ve served my time. To make sure I don’t go home too early, I use this little trick.

Windows tracks your logons in the event log. So to find out when you came in;

1. Open the event viewer; *windows+r, ‘eventvwr’, enter*
2. Select ‘Custom Views’
3. Right-click and choose ‘Create custom view…’
4. Open the ‘XML’ tab
5. Check ‘Edit query manually’
6. Enter this XML;
   
<QueryList>
<Query Id="0" Path="Security">
<Select Path="Security">*[System[(EventID=4672)] and EventData[Data[@Name='SubjectUserName'] = 'your-name-here']]</Select>
</Query>
</QueryList>
7. Replace ‘your-name-here’ with your domain username
8. Choose ‘OK’.
9. Set the name to ‘Logins’
10. Hit ‘OK’.

And there you go. There in Custom Views will be a list of your login events. Find the earliest one in the day and that’s when you first logged in.

Huge firework display, candy floss, and an eighties medley. Perfect.