Working with the Windows clipboard in managed code is both easy and hard. It’s easy because all you need to do in order to put a bit of text on the clipboard is this:

Clipboard.SetText("Put this on the clipboard");

It’s hard because you can’t just do something like this in order to get formatted text:

Clipboard.SetHtml('<a href="http://twwilliams.com/>A link</a>"');

The Windows clipboard requires content to be in special formats if you have anything other than text and the System.Windows.Forms.Clipboard class doesn’t provide any convenience methods for handling HTML. But writing your own isn’t too hard.

Mike Stall provides the solution.

In essence, you need to wrap your HTML fragment in a specially-formatted header and then put that on the clipboard.

One thing Mike doesn’t address in his sample is how to set the plain-text version of an HTML fragment so that you can still paste to places like Notepad that don’t support formatted output.

If you only set the System.Windows.Forms.DataFormats.Html part of the clipboard, when you go to Notepad and paste, you will get nothing. So you also need to set the DataFormats.Text part. But it gets a little bit more complicated because you can’t just do this:

Clipboard.SetText(htmlString, TextDataFormat.Html);
Clipboard.SetText(plainTextString, TextDataFormat.Text);

If you do this, you’re setting two values to the clipboard in succession and you will only have the last one (in this case, the plain text) on the clipboard. To set both formats, you need to use a System.Windows.Forms.DataObject:

DataObject dataObj = new DataObject();
dataObj.SetData(DataFormats.Text, plainTextString);
dataObj.SetData(DataFormats.Html,
                HtmlFragment.GetClipboardFormatted(htmlString));
Clipboard.SetDataObject(dataObj);

In this example, the HtmlFragment.GetClipboardFormatted(htmlString) is a method I adapted from Mike Stall’s example that returns the formatted string rather than putting it directly on the clipboard as in his example.

The last thing to remember about working with the clipboard: your program must run in single-threaded apartment mode so set the [STAThread] attribute.

My laptop gets confused when it goes in or comes out of the docking station and always picks the wrong resolution for the monitor. Part of this might be due to a difference in aspect ratios: the laptop screen is a widescreen model (width:height is 4:3) while the monitor connected to the docking station is 5:4.

I have gotten pretty good at Win-R, desk.cpl<enter>, Alt-R, <right> (or <right><right><right> as the case may be), <enter>, <left><enter> but I would still rather do something quicker.

So this morning I decided to write a bit of C# to handle it. I didn’t know of anything that ships in the .NET Framework to handle this directly so I went off to pinvoke.net and found what I was looking for.

The code example is formatted strangely but they link to a sample on CodeProject that presents it a bit more clearly. It is a bit strange that the class he created changes the resolution in its constructor rather than through a method. It is just a sample, after all.