The Windows Forms designer sometimes feels very dumb - one of those times is when dealing with nested properties on a control which by default is not displayed as an expandable property that you can just dig into. Instead you have to do a bit of busy work using a TypeConverter to make it possible to create an expandable property in the designer. Here's how.

Dragging content into the Web Browser control and capturing the content dropped can be tricky. The Web Browser Control is based on Internet Explorer and is actually an ActiveX control hosted inside of a container and because of that is difficult to deal with. In this post I describe how you can get around this issue and still capture images and files dropped on the control and handle the drop operations.

If you need to debug JavaScript code or layout issues in a Web Browser control inside of a Windows desktop application, you've probably found that the experience sucks. Although Internet Explorer on which the control is based suppports rich developer tools, those are not available in the Web Browser control. Enter an oldie but goodie: FireBug which is an embeddable Console implementation that provides a lot of the features that you find in modern browser developer tools and with a couple of lines of html you can add this debugger into your application.

If you're using the Web Browser Control or the Internet.Application Shell object, you might need to call Javacript t code inside the pages loaded in the browser to manipulate the page from say a WinForms app that interacts with the Web Browser control. Some things are just much easier to do with client side script code and being able to initiate this code from .NET can be very useful. This entry describes how you can access the DOM to call script functions both in .NET and FoxPro.

One really annoying thing about WinForms is that there's no built in support for transparency for controls. If you want to create a label and want it to blend into any custom background colors this isn't inherently supported. Although there's a static Color.Transparent color property, when you apply to a label on a form it doesn't actually do anything - you get the same default background color...