Thread: "Invisible" & sign.

I can't cut/paste because the machine with the IDE is not connected to the net!

I place a label on the screen, and a button. When the button is pressed, it does:

label1.Text = ">>>&<<<";

What shows up on the screen is >>><<<. If I take the length of the .Text field it shows 7. If I write >>>&&<<< it appears right, (ie. a single ampersand), on the screen, but the length is now 8.

Whats wrong here?

Use a verbatim string literal.

Code:

label1.Text = @">>>&<<<";

The &-char is used to indicate that the following char is used for keyboard shortcuts.

"&Next" would spell "Next", once you press Alt, it would be "Next" and pressing "N" on the keyboard would select this action.

Still not present on the screen using the @ operator. It is in a string for example.

I wasn't thinking and nvoigt set me straight.

It wouldn't work. The problem is as nvoigt puts it. For the & sign to stop being treated as a special character, set the UseMnemonic property to false.

Code:

label1.UseMenmonic = false;
label1.Text = ">>>&<<<";

There's no need for a verbatim string either.

Not really. The API is free to establish the rules of how it operates. Since Mnemonics is such a fundamental aspect of a Windows GUI, it's perfectly acceptable. What would be gross was for the API to not give you the option to disable mnemonics on a control basis.

Originally Posted by Fossaw

I don't want to get drawn into a debate here. I will say that I have googled, and searched the online documentation here for a couple of days and the solution was not apparent. The product is being pushed as a beginner tool, and beginners are not good at searching for stuff like this. The product is also making great pains to show it's xml features, where the & symbol is frequently used, (indeed, how I came upon the problem), yet I cannot find it there either.

We disagree, fair enough.

True, but think it the other way. If false for mnemonics was the default choice (you have to have a default choice). Then again you would need to search for it. And beginners wouldn't know the term mnemonics which would make searching for it more difficult to achieve the desired operation.
So these kind of decisions from MS part are not easy. That is why they change things with every new release and there are always complains.
My personal preference would be to keep it simple for beginners, thus agreeing with you. And enable options to change default parameters, so advance users wouldn't set Mnemonics always true with each label created. But then you have the marketing question. If you set everything simple by default, the new user might not learn its many features and never use them. Now you are encouraged to look upon the many options available.
So, as expected, I would say that MS has the right policy, not meaning that they do everything right. Even thought I would want a different policy.

The same goes for other API. I was using QT, for example, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to set the background color of a control exactly the way I want. What it did was to inherit it from a parent control. So I disabled that feature. And again didn't work. I had to change an application variable, sth like an enviromental variable, to make it work the way I want. Impossible to find without searching the internet.

Originally Posted by C_ntua

True, but think it the other way. If false for mnemonics was the default choice (you have to have a default choice). Then again you would need to search for it. And beginners wouldn't know the term mnemonics which would make searching for it more difficult to achieve the desired operation.
So these kind of decisions from MS part are not easy. That is why they change things with every new release and there are always complains.
My personal preference would be to keep it simple for beginners, thus agreeing with you. And enable options to change default parameters, so advance users wouldn't set Mnemonics always true with each label created. But then you have the marketing question. If you set everything simple by default, the new user might not learn its many features and never use them. Now you are encouraged to look upon the many options available.

Also, remember, this is a legacy feature. For the first versions of Windows, it WAS a very good idea to make everything use mnemonics by default, because the first versions were designed to be fully usable to users without a mouse -- which at the time was rare to see in the personal computing world.

Even today, I'd say for most form elements it's desirable to use mnemonics, because people who will use your program regularly will often find the keyboard to be much faster than the mouse.

Yes, we disagree. Although I'm not sure what product you are talking about.

MS Visual Studio 2008, Professional. C# more generally.

Hmm... I don't know who told you this was for beginners. It's a programming language. Part of the apprenticeship process is exactly hunting down for answers to things we don't know. As we gather knowledge things start to fit in place and all will appear more easy and make more sense. It's not the other way around. In the beginning everything will appear confusing and difficult.

That's what being a beginner is all about. Confused, bewildered and sometimes slightly annoyed.

The & greatly predates C# for its use in mnemonics; it was part of the original WinAPI, and everything that's built upon the WinAPI, including Windows Forms, still recognizes it.