Quite some time ago I posted an article called "How to make a full-screen Windows app using VB.NET". I’ve just added a comment to that post in response to a number of queries I’ve had re how to change the application back to normal mode/how to restore the window back to normal.

Have you ever needed to query a specific key value in an XML file? Depending on the format of your XML file, here’s how to do it using XPathNavigator.

Back in Using VB.NET to display Cacti & RTG graphs - Part 1 I wrote some stuff about how I’ve been implementing an application to show Cacti and RTG graphs on a 42″ plasma screen.

Recently I wrote a post to start a “thread” about how I’ve been implementing a site monitor application to run on our 42″ plasma TV.

At the moment I’m working on an application that will eventually run on one of our plasma screens to show statistics and the current status of a number of things on our network and infrastructure. We use Cacti and RTG to map this data at the moment but they only produce static data, [...]

Yesterday I posted an article about how to list all the users in your Active Directory using VB.NET. This post is a lot smaller and will cover how to search your Active Directory for a specific user.

As per usual I had a situation recently where I had to do some Active Directory stuff with VB.NET. I had to grab a list of all the users in our AD so that people could select a user and perform functions on them from within a webpage.

So what is this Active Directory thing? It’s Microsoft’s directory service implementation and is used to define domain-level computer network infrastructures for (mostly) corporate networks. Sometimes you might want to use .NET to check inside your Active Directory to see if an email address exists.

Recently I had to write a Windows application that required the main form to run in full-screen mode. This means no title bar and with the window appearance above everything else, i.e. Start Button, taskbar, system tray and all other apps.

More and more applications these days, both web and Windows, are using XML files as an effective method of storing data. XML files are both easy to manage and simple to implement. However, there are several different ways of opening and reading/navigating through them.