Have you been waiting and waiting and waiting for a response to your application to participate in the reporting services beta? (Like I was?) I just happened to go to Beta Place today and there was Reporting Services in my area of “active programs”. I know I get a gazillion emails, but I can’t imagine I would have missed/deleted the typical “welcome to the beta” email. So if you are waiting, go check www.betaplace.com, you may actually already be in the program.

Waitaminutehere! Lonestar is listed there, too. Now why didn’t I get any kind of notification? Hmmmmm…

I had some difficulty figuring this out. ALthough the ink can interact with the clipboard, I wanted to have an explicit place to tuck away my strokes and retrieve them again. A few hints in the Tablet Newsgroup pointed me in to some interesting methods and I was able to come up with the following solution. Take a look at the functionality of ink.CreateStrokes, ink.ExtractStrokes and ink.AddStrokestoRectangle to better understand this code.

(DeletedStrokes is just a ListArray created elsewhere in the class)

Case “undo”

With (InkPicture1.Ink)
Dim id As Int32 = .Strokes(.Strokes.Count – 1).Id
Dim ids() As Int32 = {id}
Dim delStrokes As Strokes = .CreateStrokes(ids)
Dim storeInk As Ink = .ExtractStrokes(delStrokes, ExtractFlags.RemoveFromOriginal)
DeletedStrokes.Add(storeInk)
.Strokes.Remove(.Strokes(.Strokes.Count – 1))
End With
InkPicture1.Refresh()

Case “redo”
If DeletedStrokes.Count > 0 Then
Dim storeInk As Ink = DeletedStrokes(DeletedStrokes.Count – 1)
InkPicture1.Ink.AddStrokesAtRectangle(storeInk.Strokes, thisink.GetBoundingBox)
DeletedStrokes.Remove(thisink)
InkPicture1.Refresh()
End If

note: I gave up on the webclient class and used Vick Soulios’ VB FTP class on GotDotNet. It hangs for a few seconds when it’s making the connection, but the upload works like a charm. Thanks Vick! But if someone can explain WHY the webclient.UploadFile was failing – translation …what was I doing wrong…I’d love to know and share the answer.

I have been having some fun with the WebClient.UploadFile method for the last few days. My IIS Admin is joining in as well. According to the docs, this is the non asp.net way to emulate the HTMLInput file posting methodology. One advantage you have in asp.net is that if you are posting the file to the same domain, then it’s easy enough to set the proper permissions to let this happen. However, when you are trying to do this from outside of the domain, it ain’t so easy. IIS doesn’t see a referral page, so it blocks the request. The only suggestion I have found anywhere is to bag the UploadFile and go with TCPClient and a network Stream. Sure I can do that if I have to, but then what’s the purpose of the UploadFile? When I am setting the proper credentials using my ftp login and password, I can’t see how this is any different than using a standard FTP app such as WS_FTP.

Another thing I have found in my queries is a number of people trying to upload files to web services. Someone always asks – “why on earth do you want to upload a file to a web service?” Now I know the answer! Because the web service will have all of the same authentication that the asp.net app does.

But I will figure out how to use the WebClient.UploadFile because now I’m determined to make it work and I’ll definitely share the solution here.

If anyone was wondering what ever happened to BLInk!, my tablet blogging app, this (and work and some damned fine skiing snow) has been part of the holdup.