February 2007 Entries
If you use Visual Studio Express, you may have been disappointed by its lack of an icon editor. I've recently come across an amazing icon editor called IcoFX. This beauty extracts from DLL's and EXE's, and creates new icons with an interface that looks like a paint program. It exports and imports standard bitmap formats, and just generally does a great job. Best of all, it's free! Even if you are using a version of Visual Studio that includes the icon editor, it's worth it to give IcoFX a try. Link to IcoFX - The Free Icon Editor
I was doing some searching or documentation on WDS and came across this blog entry which mentions that a new version of WDS has been released pretty recently. I have downloaded and installed it. We'll see if there's anything noticeably different. I'm guessing probably not, other than it now has built-in support for UNC locations. This is nice. It seemed silly to install a MS add-on to index my network drives. Considering I have 500GB on a NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit, any indexing tool really needs to be able to handle shares. It's worth the update (no worse than...
Everyone knows that the Windows key () pops up the Start Menu, but it has a few other cool shortcuts built-in to XP. +E brings up Windows Explorer. Much more convenient than navigating the Start Menu! +R brings up the Run command for typing shell commands. +Pause brings up the My Computer properties dialog. I'm not sure why this is built-in, except it might be handy for support issues. +TAB switches between applications using the buttons in the task bar (at the bottom of the screen) instead of popping up the task switcher dialog. In Vista,...
Have you ever wanted to create non-TXT files in Notepad? I've always done it by changing "Save as type" to "All Files" and used a different extension. If you forget to do that, it appends ".txt" to whatever you enter. What a pain! It turns out that you can just use quotes around the filename to give it any extension that you like. Here I am saving a file with the "htm" extension: So easy to do!
So I'm working in Visual Studio Tools for Office (2005 SE) for the first time. I've used Visual Studio Team Suite to create VSTO add-ins before, but not the specific VSTO-branded Visual Studio. Wow. Talk about limiting. I'm trying to create a UserControl to host in the Task Pane (the pane on the right which houses Clip Art and Research). When the customization runs, I get this incredibly useful message: Yeah. Not much for details. I thought that I remembered getting a stack trace at this point with Team Suite. So I think, "I know, I'll set debugging...
I've been working with Zooomr for a number of months now and have uploaded almost 200 pictures. I never jumped onboard any photo provider because I'm so cheap! Flickr looked cool, but was too limiting with the free account. PicasaWeb is looking much better (very nice UI, awesome integration with Picasa), but still not enough space with a free account. Zooomr has a promotional deal offering "Pro for Life" accounts to bloggers so I decided it was time to give it a try. It's clearly cloning Flickr in many ways, though it does do a few things better. You must...
My newest article (part 1 of 2) has been posted on MSDN Coding 4 Fun. It uses Windows Desktop Search (again) to demonstrate some interesting ways to leverage the index. I wanted to create a replacement for the standard file open dialog using search instead of folder navigation. You refine your search by file type, then up to three attribute/value pairs. At this point there are still a few issues with performance, and it's not quite useful enough yet, but it's getting close. It's pretty good at replacing the iTunes browser for the moment, and you can search for other...