A commonly used standard for high quality sound reproduction is the Waveform Audio File Format, with sound data usually stored in WAV files. The .NET framework provides the SoundPlayer class to allow simple playback of such files.
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Transact-SQL includes the WAITFOR statement. This command allows the execution of a script or procedure to be blocked for a period of up to twenty-four hours. The process can be delayed until a specified time or for a number of hours, minutes and seconds.
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Sometimes it is necessary to know how much time has passed since Windows was started. This article demonstrates two ways to obtain this information using the .NET framework and describes the limitations of one of the commonly used methods.
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When developing software that monitors running processes, it can be useful to obtain details of the currently active application. The .NET framework does not provide methods to permit this so Platform Invocation Services (P/Invoke) must be used.
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A common task is to calculate the number of business days that exist within a date range. In most western cultures, these are the days from Monday to Friday and excluding Saturdays and Sundays. The resultant number should also exclude national holidays.
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When an application stores information within files, it is common to include some simple file management tasks within the software. This article describes methods of copying, moving, renaming and deleting files using C# and the .NET framework.
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When writing software that will be used by the visually impaired or for systems that have only an audio interface, it can be important to synthesise speech. The .NET framework includes standard classes that make this task simple to achieve.
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The forty-ninth part of the SQL Server Programming Fundamentals tutorial describes the Soundex functions that are provided by Transact-SQL (T-SQL). These functions allow strings to be compared according to their pronunciation by English speakers.
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There are various ways to hold application-wide and user-specific settings externally to a program. One is to set up application settings in a Visual Studio project. These permit strongly typed configuration that can be changed without recompiling.
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When working with strings that contain multiple lines of text, each line is separated with a line break. Line breaks are often added by inserting carriage return and line feed escape characters. This can cause cross-platform compatibility problems.
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Creating strings with the use of multiple concatenation operations can lead to low performance and wasteful memory usage. The StringBuilder class allows strings to be created and updated without the problems caused by the immutability of the String class.
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Visual Studio provides several tools to allow you to quickly locate text within a file, project or solution. This article describes the Incremental Search feature, which permits fast searching of a file with no interaction with dialog boxes required.
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When creating applications that will be used internationally, particularly with a shared database that holds date and time data, it is important to be able to obtain information about time zones. This can be achieved with .NET 3.5's TimeZoneInfo class.
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The Gang of Four are the four authors of the book, "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software". In this article their twenty-three design patterns are described with links to UML diagrams, source code and real-world examples for each.
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