Converting a Cursor to a Bitmap in .NET

I’ve been playing around with a little tool I’ve been developing and needed to display a Cursor in a PictureBox. There doesn’t seem to be built-in way to convert a Cursor to a Bitmap, which kind of makes sense since it might be an animated cursor so it wouldn’t be sensible to convert it to a Bitmap. I couldn’t find any examples on the web, so thought I’d post this code that does the trick.

          System.Windows.Forms.Cursor cursor = new System.Windows.Forms.Cursor(stream);
          Bitmap bitmap = new Bitmap(cursor.Size.Width, cursor.Size.Height);
          using (Graphics gBmp = Graphics.FromImage(bitmap))
          {
            cursor.Draw(gBmp, new Rectangle(0, 0, cursor.Size.Width, cursor.Size.Height));
            pictureBox.Image = bitmap;
          }

Storing and restoring the clipboard contents

My hacky method to get HTML into Word programmatically had a slight flaw in that it splatted anything the user had placed on the clipboard. I consider it to be bad manners to mess with the clipboard because it’s the user’s clipboard, not my application’s. Many years ago I was forced to use Lotus Notes, which used the clipboard whenever I replied to an email, so I can’t really write code that does something that has annoyed me in the past.

So I had to figure out how to fix it. The below did the trick, although I haven’t tested it with all clipboard formats so it may not work with all of them. And if you’re wondering why this is in VB.NET and the previous example was in C#, I was forced to convert all the code to VB.NET, much to my chagrin.

      ' store current contents of clipboard
      Dim currentData As IDataObject = Clipboard.GetDataObject()
      Dim formats As String() = currentData.GetFormats()
      Dim currentClipboard As Dictionary(Of String, Object) = New Dictionary(Of String, Object)
      For Each Format As String In formats
        currentClipboard.Add(Format, currentData.GetData(Format))
      Next

      ' do stuff...

      ' put back old clipboard contents
      Dim newData As DataObject = New DataObject()
      For Each savedFormat As KeyValuePair(Of String, Object) In currentClipboard
        newData.SetData(savedFormat.Key, savedFormat.Value)
      Next
      Clipboard.SetDataObject(newData)

FxCop 10

When I fired up FxCop 1.36 today, the update check, for probably the first time ever, told me there was a new version available. So I went off to get the update. The odd thing was that I wasn’t pointed towards an installer but a text file. That pointed out that FxCop was now part of the Windows SDK, so installing it is now something of a bigger job than it used to be. In fact, installing the SDK doesn’t install FxCop, it just copies the installer to your machine which then has to be run separately.

But the fact that the version number had increased so much got me excited, thinking there must be lots of improvements… After loading it up and running it against a project, I was a little disappointed. I didn’t spot any new rules and the only difference I noticed was that my custom rules assembly no longer worked.

Updating my rules assembly was pretty simple. First remove the references to the 1.36 assemblies (FxcopSdk.dll and Microsoft.Cci.dll), then update the project to target the .NET Framework 4 (of course this means it has to be built in VS 2010), add references to the version 10 assemblies and rebuild. And it all worked first time. My rules are pretty simple so I don’t know if it will be as easy to upgrade more complex rules assemblies but it all looks pretty good for backwards compatibility.

That said, there doesn’t seem to be any compelling reason to upgrade, unless I’ve missed something.