visual studio
One of the most enjoyable new features in Visual Studio .NET 2005 is Code Snippets. This animated GIF illustrates how it works: I’m demonstrating three types of snippets here: * simple expansion * template expansion (with variables) * surround The easiest way to enter a code snippet is to begin typing part
media center
As Omar recently pointed out, Update Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center 2005 adds one essential new feature that makes it a “must have” upgrade – non-linear stretch! I took a few screenshots on my HTPC to illustrate. This is typical 4:3 television content: On a widescreen 16:
programming languages
I just updated my Programming Fonts entry. It now includes a much larger code sample in each font, and a few new fonts including the “gee, did I really just pay $100 for a single font” Pragmata. Be sure to check it out. It’s a shame that there’s
hardware
Software engineers aren’t the only ones planting secret Easter eggs in their products. Here’s a fun article on the hidden art etched into microchips. There are a handful of images in the article, but many more at the Silicon Zoo website. Here’s one I found of Mr.
asp.net
Inspired by Scott Hanselman’s recent post on ASP.NET viewstate wrangling, here’s a roundup of tips for dealing with that ornery viewstate stuff. The first rule of thumb, of course, is to turn it off whenever you can. But sometimes you can’t. I think the DotNetNuke developers
programming languages
In the process of researching a few recent blog entries, I found the amazing Atari Archives. The title is a little misleading; it isn’t completely Atari specific. The archives contain incredible page-by-page high resolution images of many classic computer books, including The Best of Creative Computing, volume
security
In The Humane Interface, the late Jef Raskin asks an intriguing question: why do login dialogs have a “User” field? Shouldn’t login dialogs look more like this? And you know what? He’s right. Your password alone should be enough information for the computer to know who you are.
windows
When I see people using the default, crappy Windows ALT+TAB task switching behavior, I experience physical pain. TaskSwitchXP is completely free and so much better. It’s super small, totally elegant, lightning fast, and generally a massive improvement in task switching functionality. Friends don’t let friends suffer through
c#
As promised, here is my C# implementation of the ASCII85 algorithm. This code is a loose port of the C sample referenced from the Wikipedia page. It’s too much code to paste into a single entry, so I packaged it as a VS.NET 2003 solution – using Clean Sources
programming languages
On one of our e-commerce web sites, we needed a unique transaction ID to pass to a third party reporting tool on the checkout pages. We already had a GUID on the page for internal use. And you know how much we love GUIDs! 22da5537-de54-459d-9b33-f40f2101143b
user experience
One thing I dislike about classic WIMP GUI applications is the way they typically present you with a blank page at startup. Here’s what Word 2003 looks like just after I launch it: This leads to Blank Page Syndrome: when presented with infinite choice, it’s sometimes hard to
user experience
This OS X versus Windows XP site contains an exhaustive, extensively illustrated 100-topic comparison of these two operating systems. The author tries to be objective, which is admirable, but the extremely detailed comparison is worth reading mostly because it highlights a lot of subtle design differences. For example, this