Some missing blog tasks...

It would appear that I have missed some blog tasks over the journey of my course so far. To be honest, I was under the impression that the tasks in question were being given out because some people in the class had expresses a concern that they didn't know what to blog on. I wasn't aware that they were compulsory topics. Nonetheless, they are, so I shall do them now.

We were supposed to list 2 VB resources. I listed the companion site that goes along with the book we use for class. You can find it in the archives if you would like to have a look at it. So I'm going to add 3 more resource sites for good measure:

• http://www.freeprogrammingresources.com/vbtutor.html . This site covers VB from the early days onwards.
• http://www.thevbzone.com/ . This site looks pretty good from what I've seen of it.
• http://www.homeandlearn.co.uk/net/nets11p1.html . This is one that Rachael has listed also, but it comes with some pretty handy information on classes and what not.

ASCII and Unicode
Information on ASCII code was taken straight from the Wikipedia site:

American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), pronounced /ˈæski/^[1] is a coding standard that can be used for interchanging information, if the information is expressed mainly by the written form of English words. It is implemented as a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communicationscharacter-encoding schemes—which support many more characters than did the original—have a historical basis in ASCII. equipment, and other devices that work with text. Most modern

Historically, ASCII developed from telegraphic codes. Its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on ASCII formally began October 6, 1960, with the first meeting of the American Standards Association's (ASA) X3.2 subcommittee. The first edition of the standard was published in 1963,^[2][3] a major revision in 1967,^[4] and the most recent update in 1986.^[5] Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting (i.e., alphabetization) of lists, and added features for devices other than teleprinters.

ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing, mostly obsolete control characters that affect how text is processed;^[6] 94 are printable characters, and the space is considered an invisible graphic.^[7] The most commonly used character encoding on the World Wide Web was US-ASCII^[8] until 2008, when it was surpassed by UTF-8.^[9]

For more information, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII .

Unicode information was also taken from Wikipedia:

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Developed in tandem with the Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard, Unicode consists of a repertoire of more than 100,000 characters, a set of code charts for visual reference, an encoding methodology and set of standard character encodings, an enumeration of character properties such as upper and lower case, a set of reference data computer files, and a number of related items, such as character properties, rules for normalization, decomposition, collation, rendering and bidirectional display order (for the correct display of text containing both right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic or Hebrew, and left-to-right scripts).^[1]

The Unicode Consortium, the non-profit organization that coordinates Unicode's development, has the ambitious goal of eventually replacing existing character encoding schemes with Unicode and its standard Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) schemes, as many of the existing schemes are limited in size and scope and are incompatible with multilingual environments.

Unicode's success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread and predominant use in the internationalization and localization of computer software. The standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including XML, the Java programming language, the Microsoft .NET Framework and modern operating systems.

Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings. The most commonly used encodings are UTF-8 (which uses 1 byte for all ASCII characters, which have the same code values as in the standard ASCII encoding, and up to 4 bytes for other characters), the now-obsolete UCS-2 (which uses 2 bytes for all characters, but does not include every character in the Unicode standard), and UTF-16 (which extends UCS-2, using 4 bytes to encode characters missing from UCS-2).

And you can find further information here ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode ) and here ( http://unicode.org/ ).

VB.NET OpenFileDialog
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the VB.NET OpenFileDialog has to do with opening and saving files. In all seriousness though, according to VB Helper ( http://www.vb-helper.com/howto_net_use_restoredirectory.html ):

When you use an OpenFileDialog and the user changes directories, the dialog changes the application's current directory. If you set the dialog's RestoreDirectory property to True, then the dialog resets the current directory to its original value when it closes. Note that the dialog still keeps the new directory as its starting point the next time you display it.

UML Class Diagram
UML stands for Unified Modeling Language and is useful in all aspects of the design process as stated by Donald Bell ( http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/content/RationalEdge/sep04/bell/ ):

Structure diagrams are useful throughout the software lifecycle for a variety of team members. In general, these diagrams allow for design validation and design communication between individuals and teams. For example, business analysts can use class or object diagrams to model a business's current assets and resources, such as account ledgers, products, or geographic hierarchy. Architects can use the component and deployment diagrams to test/verify that their design is sound. Developers can use class diagrams to design and document the system's coded (or soon-to-be-coded) classes.

This is one area that I will be looking into over the break starting at the end of this week.

I was also supposed to do a description of the cat and dog classes that we're working on at the moment, however, I need a little more information from Rachael to find out just what it is that she needs in the post.

So until then, I hope all's well for you.

All the best,

Tim.