PayPal is a great service for enabling both businesses and consumers to buy and sell goods and services online without exposing private financial information to the other parties in a transaction. As a consumer, you can safely purchase goods and services online without exposing your credit or debit card information to be recorded and possibly misused. As a business, you can be paid for your goods or services using the Web or email without the need of storing your customer’s private financial information.

A big concern with PayPal is that anyone who knows the password of your PayPal account can access the financial services that you have authorized to be used with PayPal. For consumers, this means that unauthorized purchases or cash transfer may be performed from your credit cards and bank accounts. As a business, unauthorized PayPal access can be a source of fraudulent purchases. Password security is always the responsibility of the PayPal account holder; but now PayPal has a service to make the disclosure of your PayPal password an almost insignificant threat.

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For people who have been waiting for Half-life 2: Episode 2 to be released, you may now pre-purchase the Orange Box package on Steam. The Orange Box contains Half-life 2, HL2: Episode 1, HL2: Episode 2, Portal, and the long awaited Team Fortress 2 (and you thought Duke Nukem Forever would be out first, eh?). Pre-purchasing the Orange Box allows you to pre-load the HL2 content to your computer and be ready to play when it is released on October 10, 2007. You are also allowed to participate in the TF2 beta starting Monday, September 17th. Individually these games are $130US, but the Orange Box price with pre-purchase discount is only $45US. If you haven’t yet jumped on the Half-life bandwagon yet, other Half-life 2 packages with Counter Strike, Team Fortress Classic, and all of the original Half-life releases are available too.

Also guaranteed to delight TFC aficionados is the release of Fortress Forever, a free Team Fortress Classic mod for Half-life 2. The updated look-and-feel of HL2 with the very familiar classes and maps of TFC make FF impossible for nostalgic TFC gamers–such as myself–to resist. (I think the Half-life deathmatch servers are going to be very quiet from now on.) You can download Fortress Forever from FilePlanet. And if you can’t remember the last time that you updated your ATI or nVidia graphics card drivers, it’s time.

If you see DarthDemo on a FF or TF2 server, be sure to say “Hi!” and I’ll be happy to frag ya! ;)

I’ve been testing software using 64-bit Windows Vista Ultimate Edition running in VMWare 6 on a Dell 64-bit server. I connect to the server using Remote Desktop, logon to my account, run VMWare, and start the Vista virtual machine. My problem is that with this setup the mouse in Vista is very draggy and quite annoying to use. This is the behavior that you would expect when running a remote access application over a low-bandwidth, high-latency network connection. But I’m running on a gigabit LAN and connecting to a server in the next room! What gives?

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Exam objective: 70-526 - Configure the PropertyGrid component

The .NET Framework contains a fairly complete selection of controls and form components that allow information to be input, presented and changed in many different ways. In this article I will cover one of the more complex but also feature-rich components in the .NET framework: the PropertyGrid. Regardless of whether you have experience with the using the PropertyGrid in your own apps, if you used Visual Studio, you already used the PropertyGrid component many times. Visual Studio uses several PropertyGrid components in its main interface, the most obvious being the Properties and Events windows, highlighted in the screenshot below:

So setting the Properties of a Form or control for example is done by using a PropertyGrid and as you can see, it is very complete. It allows you to set a wide variety of Property types such as Booleans, Strings, Integers, Fonts, Point and Size structures, Colors, Images, Enums, and Collections without the need for complex code. Additionally, the PropertyGrid component can be extended to support additional custom property types and to customize the GUI of the properties in the PropertyGrid.

The PropertyGrid is particularly useful when you have a good amount of different properties that need to be set or displayed in the proper format. If you would use a combination of labels, textboxes, radio buttons, checkboxes, etc. you would have to create many different controls and write input validation code. That doesn’t mean a PropertyGrid is always a better alternative, a form with the classic form components works best for most applications as users are familiar with it.

Throughout the rest of this article we’re going to create an example project that shows you how little effort it takes to add a working PropertyGrid to a Form. After going over some basic properties of the PropertyGrid itself, we’ll cover its implementation in more detail. I assume you have some basic experience with Visual Studio and setting control properties using the GUI.

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As an academic student of Information Security, I am very happy to announce that my school, Capella University, has been named a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education (CAE/IAE) by the National Security Agency (NSA) for the academic years 2007-2012. To earn this status, Capella’s information technology programs, curriculum, and faculty passed a rigorous review demonstrating a commitment to academic excellence in information assurance education.

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