The Utility Library

Introduction

The NetXP Utility class offers some useful miscellaneous utility methods, some of which can be used to get around known bugs in .NET. All properties and methods in this class are static (shared) and therefore accessible without instantiating the class.

The Methods

AddPNGToImageList - This handy little method adds any transparent image to an image list, preserving perfect alpha channel transparency.
BrowseForFolder - A quick and dirty function to display a Browse-For-Folder dialog.
Deserialize/Serialize [Isolated] - These functions can be used for quick XML serialization and deserialization.
FixPropertyGridsAndTreeViews - This utility function fixes property grids to persist the visible properties, and makes tree views' scrollbars skinable, fixing a few bugs found in the .NET Framework.
IsNull - A very neat function that verifies if a string/collection is null or empty, i.e. if it is null or its length is 0.
SetXPPasswordChar - This function can be used to set the XP-style password character '●' for text boxes, used instead of the standard asterisk character '*' on Windows XP.