VB.Net : Creating Multiple Balloontips Notification with NotifyIcon Control - vb.net

I'm currently developing a simple program for my company to approve and acknowledge request, using Visual Studio NotifyIcon to help showing notification via BalloonTip. However, I'm unable to show 2 BalloonTips in the same time, but instead the latter notification overwrites the first BalloonTip.
Is there a way to show multiple BalloonTips without the old one being overwritten?
I'm using Visual Studio 2010 with .Net Framework 4.0 to develop the program.
Thank you before.
Best Regard,
Jeff

Related

How to implement UI testing for continuous delivery of a Office Add-in (app for Office)

We are developing Office Add-ins (apps for office) and we want to automate the testing for continuous delivery by using VSTS.
Because the Add-ins are web apps I wanted to use tools like Selenium, but that doesn't seem to work because the app is not in a browser (but is using the IE engine from within Word)
I tried using the Coded UI tests from visual studio, but they are not functioning correctly. It seems to handle some basic UI events, but even simple things typing text result in unpredictable behavior. (missing characters, clicking the wrong items).
I hope someone else has some experience on how to do this?
Thank you very much.
What we have done with our add-in, for automated testing of the task pane, is to mock the Office API methods we are using, and inject the mocked Office object into our code (vs importing the real Office API script and referencing the global). This has worked well for us, using Mocha+Chai+Sinon+Enzyme for our React-based add-in.

"Sideload" an App for Office programatically on the Desktop

I'm not sure whether "sideloading" is the correct term: Is therea an API to programatically install an Office Javascript API based add-in (e.g. a Task Pane app) in to the current / specific document on the desktop (at least on Windows)?
VisualStudio does this when you debug an App for Office project. How do I go about achieving the same?
There is no current way to programmatically insert an app (now "Office Add-in") into a document via JavaScript. It is a scenario that the product group is aware of, but it's not something we have yet.
You can insert an it via the Open XML SDK (which is actually how Visual Studio does this), but that would be .NET code running outside of the Office add-in (and not on the currently open document). Visual Studio in particular is atually inserting an app registered into the special local registry-based "Developer Store", but I can't think of any reason why wouldn't work for an actual Office-Store or SharePoint App Catalog-hosted app. If you are interested in going this route, let me know, and I might be able to find some pointers on the code you'd need to write.
Finally (though it probably goes without saying), you can insert an app into a Template, rather than a regular document. That way, anyone creating a document from that template would get your add-in -- I believe that's what the Paypal Invoicing add-in in Excel does, for example.
Hope this helps,
~ Michael Zlatkovsky, Developer on Office Extensibility team, MSFT

Lync Server administrative interface

The task I am looking at is to automate the process of creating new users on a Lync 2010 server. Looking at the Lync Server SDK, this only allows creating new phone calls and sending IM. I'm looking for an interface to automate administrative task.
What I don't want to do in first place is to parse the web interface. Does anyone know of anything that might help?
There is a certain number of PowerShell cmdlets I wasnt aware of. The complete list can be found in the Documentation.
I don't find the good step-by-step guide I once came across, but there are several others out there that descript how you connect your PowerShell to the Lync Server (like this).
I haven't tested any of these scripts, but Microsoft also provides a list of useful scripts to administrate Lync (link).
The problem I was initially looking for was: How do I hide disabled user accounts in the Lync Contact list. This can be done by ticking the checkbox "Hide user from global address list" in Exchange (Note: when this is done via e.g. VBScript it takes some time before the GAL is updated, in my case the account first vanished from GAL and the next morning it also disappeared from the Lync Contact List).

Silverlight 4 Screen Capture

I'm writing a timesheet helper utility in Silverlight 4. This will be a trusted out of browser application that will periodically ask the user (with a SL4 Notification Window) what they have been working on. What I'd like to do is have it capture images of their desktop (or better yet, active window) from time to time in order to remind them of what they have been working on since they last submitted their status report. Is this idea even possible? Do I need to use COM? If so, what COM component would I use?
I don't know of any installed COM object you could use -- you'd have to create one and install it.

How do I create a button to check for updates and install them?

I can get the program to easily, upon startup, look for updates and then install them.
I want to have a button that the user can click that will check/install updates. Is this possible, if so how?
Edit: Sorry all, not ASP.NET; VB.NET only
This msdn page outlines your different options for ClickOnce updates. It explains how to check for updates before your application starts, after you application starts, or programmatically.
My guess is that you would probably want to combine one of the automatic checks (before or after application starting) with your programmatic check (on your button click).
This is not difficult. Presumably the update/install code is in its own routine. In the button's click event code, simply call the update/install routine used by the startup code.
Add an event to the button. In this event, you use something like the WebClient to retrieve an newer installation package from your server. Then verify its signature to make sure the code is really yours and install it on the local machine.
I noticed the asp.net tag on your question. Are you talking a desktop app or like from an admin page of a customer installed web application?
If it's a desktop app, just look into a ClickOnce deployment. It has that functionality built in.
Either I am not getting the big picture or it's because i work on a asp.net environment...
Anyway, I did something like you asked for our products (web applications) and it was anything but a simple task.
Here is how I did it:
1 - Build a back office application to release new product versions.
2 - Build a webService that received a given product and a version, checked if there was an update available, if so send it to the client.
3 - On the client when received an update, installed it.
I guess the update process will be easier to do on a windows application, my only advice is to be extremely careful when doing it. Always make a safe copy of your application so if anything goes wrong you can roll-back to the previous version.