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DevExpress Spell Checker: Is there an easy (built-in) way to propagate spell checker options updates?

I have an application that contains multiple MemoEdit controls containing DevExpress spell checkers. When a user updates the Options (through a MemoEdit's context menu), we are saving those options to our db. Is there any built-in way to broadcast those new options to all spell checkers in the application? It's probably worth noting that some of the MemoEdits are used in Interop controls in the VB6 "part" of our application.
Right now I'm using events, but things aren't working out as well as I'd hoped and before I get too deeply into rolling my own fix I figured I'd ask the SO folks.
Thanks in advance for any tips.

My tech lead and I just acquired dev express subscription for a win forms application we are building and we are using the spellchecker and saving the options to our sql server ce table. We have multiple forms with one spellchecker each tied to one memo edit control per form.
I programmed a single reusable function named “GetSpellCheckerOptions” which returns type “DevExpress.ExtraSpellChecker.OptionsSpelling” that loads the six options from the spell check options dialog form from our sql server ce table. This function is invoked in a form’s constructor where the form has the spellchecker component associated to it and this can be any form in our application. It is built around an “on-demand” basis as opposed to loading it in memory and keeping it around for the lifetime of the application because the notes or comments being written by our users are on forms that load, fill it out and close.
You can use the event called OptionsChanged which is a member of the type “DevExpress.ExtraSpellChecker.OptionsSpelling”. You will have hook up the event in runtime using a subroutine you write like this for example:
jobsSpellChecker.OptionsSpelling.OptionChanged += new EventHandler(this.jobsSpellChecker_OptionChanged);
When a user changes an option on the spell check options dialog this event will fire, however there are some gotchas to be aware of. When the event fires you will not know which option fired the event because the Event Argument does not provide that information. So I save as a whole save regardless of which options were changed. The save occurs after the OK button is clicked as opposed per option being changed. The biggest gotcha is that this event fires three times. Two of those three times is from something totally unrelated to changing an option. So to control the two unneed event fires you need an if statement evaluating the options form dialog result, like this for example,
if(jobsSpellChecker.FormsManager.OptionsForm.DialogResult == System.Windows.Forms.DialogResult.OK)
This will protect your save code from being executed needlessly. In addition without the “if” statement the control has a nasty way of remembering previous state of what the options were before you changed them and during those unneeded two of three event fires, it changes your options setting from the new desired settings back to previous state or settings. Very annoying and it has taken the whole day to get past these obstacles and more experimenting with these controls. Hopefully this information can offer you or someone else a value that will save time, avoid potential frustration and endless browsing product support pages.

WPF: How to get screen readers to ignore progress bar status updates?

Recently, I have been trying to get the built-in Windows 7 narrator/screen reader to be compatible with my WPF app. There is very little info about this, but what I have read is that I can set an attached property (AutomationProperties.HelpText, AutomationProperties.AutomationID).
The problem I am having is that the UI contains a progress bar and the current progress value is periodically read out by the screen reader as it changes. In this case, reading out the progress is not desirable but I cannot find a way to turn this off. I thought maybe I could set this by accessing the AutomationPeer associated with the element, but this doesn't seem to be the case (I can force an event to be raised, but I cannot have it ignore an event).
Does anyone know of a way to do this?

This is something that's typically controlled by the screenreader itself, via user settings/options, not something you can do at the application level. Narrator, which comes with Windows, is a fairly basic screenreader; think of it more like a notepad or wordpad level compared to a screenreader like Jaws or NVDA, which are more like Word. Narrator has minimal options, while the other two likely have all sorts of options that the user can use to customize when the screenreader speaks out specific events.
So, long story short; there's nothing you can do here. Ensure that the events are sent, that way a screenreader can chose to read them or not read them, as the user directs.
Also, keep in mind that Narrator is a basic screenreader, most users will actually be using something like Jaws (which costs $800 or so) or NVDA (free!), so consider testing with those to get a closer feel for what a real-world screenreader user would experience.

how to Make a program intangable with c#?

I just wanted to know, if there is someway to make a program (or part of a program) intangable with c#. I want to make it so that people can see the program is there, but if they were to click, it would click whatever is underneath it. I would also like to know if you can do that backwords. Is there someway to make an item that is invisable, clickable?
Thank you for your help!

To your vague question, I offer a vague response:
Sounds like your option one is possible. You would need to send the click event (message) that you receive to the appropriate window (the one underneath yours). I suspect that you would have to DllImport some stuff to do this from c#.
Your option two, while more difficult, is probably also possible because you can inject code into other running executables. This will be a privileged operation, and you will likely again have to use stuff from non .NET dlls to do it from c#. See Three Ways to Inject Your Code into Another Process on CodeProject.

If you want to display something to a user without it getting in the way of whatever it was they were doing at the time you could pop up your messages in bubble from the task bar perhaps?
The answer to this question covers this. Or if you're lazy here's the code project link.

Ok so it sometimes might be necessary to show something on screen and not let it be clickable (like On-Screen-Display for video playback to show volume increase, etc..)
Here's an example of how to this in C# - from codeproject: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/OSDwindow.aspx
This uses the Win32 API ShowWindow(hWnd, SW_SHOWNOACTIVATE) to present the window without losing focus (can't be selected).
And here's the MSDN page for this call ShowWindow
To display a window that is invisible but clickable you can use a window with no border (FormBorderStyle=None) and set transparency to 1%.
Hope that helps!

ASP.NET prevent bot/spam attack from a comment form

I have a simple contact us / comment from in my website and this form will send email containing the comments, etc after it is submitted. I have used NoBot control from ajaxcontrol toolkit for several times but it seems that this control did not prevent the spam/bot attack 100%.
The client insist that this form should not have any capcha code or something that users have to insert in the form. So what is the best way to handle the spam/bot attack for my current case.
Thanks.

Without a captcha there is no 100% way of stopping all spam. (or even with a captcha)
one method would be to put an input type=text on the page and hide it using css, then if it's filled in when the form is submitted it's spam, any normal user would never even know about the field.

Outside of a captcha, the key to stopping bots on small sites is to do something custom. Bot-writers know their work, and they'll have canned scripts capable of defeating the common and even most of the uncommon systems out there. You need to do something unique. It doesn't even have to be that complicated. The person who created this very site was able to get by running a popular blog for years by simply asking his users to type in the word orange.
I want to also point out that this doesn't mean you should start from scratch. As with all security-related code, if you try to do it yourself you'll likely get it wrong. What you want to do is find a system that gives you source code and customize it for your site, so that existing scripts that know how to defeat that system will no longer work.

Application using multiple windows forms

I am (still) writing a small application which requires me to use several windows forms to show to the user.
Some of the forms just show progress messages while the application performs tests using several external devices.
The forms will usually be used in order (see below) but there may be some errors picked up from the devices, in which case an Error Reporting form will be used. The user will have the option to go back to the beginning or to the 2nd test (the 1st test takes 30 mins to perform). The error report can be invoked from any other form.
Also, the final form has the option to go back to the beginning to perform the tests on a new device.
Obviously this would cause the suite of forms to get rather tangled up. if it were used for several devices with errors etc.
So am I have a few questions.
Am I using the forms correctly and if so, how do I pass control from one form to the next one without having to go back to the original form, if that makes sense ?
Can I still have access to all variables created in preceding forms, or should I create all the variables in the initial form setup ?
Or should I have all the processing within one parent form and simply "show" the other forms as part of the procedure ?
I hope this doesn't sound too stupid, but I havent used multiple forms in C# yet. The steps are ALSO dependent on each other.
The following is the usual flowchart of forms, with PRGERREP being called from any form (more or less).
PRGSTART
PRGDEFAULT
PRGTEST1
PRGTEST2
PRGTEST3
PRGTEST4
PRGMANUAL
PRGFINALE
PRGERREP
Any help or advice would be most appreciated.

Please try to focus more on the question, not the context.
Even though i don't know exactly what you want, you should check out MDI Applications.
Basically you have a parent form with several child forms. Should your tests be finished you can BringToFront() the corresponding child window from the parent form.

I question the requirement to use multiple forms for this. Most applications show all information for a task; progress, tests, errors, messages, et al. in a single window, not multiple windows. Web browsers and office applications are very complex programs and manage to show all task information in a single window.
The fact that you are trying to "pass control" between multiple forms makes me suspect using multiple windows is a bad design. Look at the windows on your screen now; each one is a self-contained environment and does not need to "pass control" between each other.
If you are trying to make the user do something in sequence, handling errors before going on to the next step and allowing the user to "go back to the beginning", a wizard-like design may be better.
Create a single form with fields and buttons for the first task. Clicking a button redraws the form with fields and buttons for the next task, and buttons to go back or start over. This can be done more easily than creating a bunch of separate forms and trying to synchronize data between them.

Consider inheriting from an ApplicationContext to implement this logic in your application. See here and here.