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Tuesday, January 15, 2008 11:52 AM

Using the Media Center Remote from Windows

To save you the pain that I had recently, of trying to hook up simple support for the MCE remote control in your app, here is the important info that I found incredibly hard to locate via MSDN search: A C# article called "Using Alternate Input Devices
Posted by andypennell | 2 Comments
Sunday, July 29, 2007 9:54 PM

My First Program (circa 1980)

I recently discovered my first real program(*): from 1980, it was my attempt at Space Invaders for the RML 380Z. This was the government-subsidized computer for schools, my school ( Chatham House Grammar School ) was lucky enough to have one. One, yes,
Posted by andypennell | 1 Comments
Friday, February 16, 2007 2:49 PM

Xbox 360 HD DVD drive now in black

We just got some goodies on our team: Xbox 360 HD DVD drives in black! These limited-edition drives were made especially for those of us who helped work on the product, and come along with a black remote control. All I need now is an Xbox 360 at home
Posted by andypennell | 20 Comments
Friday, July 21, 2006 10:05 AM

Detecting over-Releasing on COM objects

I am in Refcount Hell right now, trying to fix a new chunk of our codebase for COM refcounting issues. Debugging missing AddRefs consumes most of my time, and I might write about that one day, but yesterday I managed to over-Release an object and of course
Posted by andypennell | 2 Comments
Friday, June 16, 2006 3:38 PM

Why Do We Always Change Notepad?

Notepad is a given. Its on every Windows machine, going back to Win16. When you need to edit something in a hurry, on any machine, then it is the obvious tool of choice. And yet with every Windows release, someone decides to change it. Not in a big way,
Posted by andypennell | 11 Comments
Wednesday, April 26, 2006 9:01 AM

Authoring iHD apps for HD DVD

My team has just created a new forum for programmers and content creators who wish to make great HD DVD apps using iHD. Look for some interesting downloads there soon.
Posted by andypennell | 2 Comments
Wednesday, March 29, 2006 12:54 PM

Correction to DLGITEMTEMPLATEEX Structure

This wasted several hours for me this morning. The MSDN docs for DLGITEMTEMPLATEEX are wrong: there is an extra WORD member after the id member, call it reserved . Note that this struct is not in any windows header: you are expected to cut & paste
Posted by andypennell | 3 Comments
Tuesday, March 28, 2006 10:22 AM

Autoexp.dat not working in Visual Studio 2005?

As this was reported twice in the space of a week internally, I figured that external users may be hitting this too. The internal emails were along the lines of "I added my custom types to autoexp.dat and they don't work". In both cases this was because
Posted by andypennell | 10 Comments
Tuesday, March 21, 2006 3:57 PM

Displaying DirectX Errors in the Debugger

Debugging DirectX calls that fail is a pain as the debugger cannot show the "nice" HRESULT codes as it does for COM errors (such as E_NOTIMPL). However you can tell the debugger about the custom error codes and add them to the [hresult] section of autoexp.dat.
Posted by andypennell | 0 Comments
Monday, March 20, 2006 10:43 AM

Property Grids Suck

I couldn't put it better myself than Avery does in his VirtualBlog - Property Grids Suck . Not only do they suck, but the use of the word Properties in what feels like half the common menu items in VS 2005 gets to me even more. There's even a great feature
Posted by andypennell | 0 Comments
Sunday, December 18, 2005 4:32 PM

A Better Way to Search MSDN

I have previously ranted about the Search capabilities of MSDN, so I decided to try and do something about it. I have created a Smart Search for MSDN page, which modifies a search engine query to greatly improve the hit rate. Well, at least it works for
Posted by andypennell | 12 Comments
Friday, December 09, 2005 5:18 PM

What does "pdb is obsolete" really mean?

If your Visual Studio debugger says this to you, it either means Your PDB really is obsolete Your debugger is obsolete 1. It gets expensive in terms of testing and (sometimes) development to read every single old PDB format, so with each release the C++
Posted by andypennell | 7 Comments
Tuesday, September 27, 2005 11:50 AM

What am I working on? iHD, that's what

So what have I been working on that I haven't been able to blog about? iHD, that's what! Its the interactivity layer for the next generation DVD format, and I'm really excited by HD-DVD, with its greatly improved picture quality, capacity, and of course
Posted by andypennell | 3 Comments
Tuesday, September 06, 2005 10:15 AM

10 Years at Microsoft

I started at Microsoft the day after Labour Day, 1995 (which I soon learned was spelled Labor Day). This was about a week after the Windows 95 launch , so things were still pretty crazy on campus. It took years for the football (er, soccer) fields to
Posted by andypennell | 1 Comments
Monday, August 29, 2005 3:42 PM

Why is MSDN Search so painful?

Since leaving Visual Studio, I have been using MSDN Online as my Help system. (I don't use integrated Visual Studio Help for reasons I'll spare you). As a Win32 programmer, I find MSDN Search a huge PITA. Its not that it can't find things, but the order
Posted by andypennell | 20 Comments
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