Craig McMurtry's WebLog

I have to talk to someone about the newest James Bond film, Skyfall . Lacking anyone I know personally who cares, I’m doing it here. Maybe there will be spoilers in what I am about to write. While Skyfall is not as bad as Quantum of Solace...

Whenever I've developed Web applications, which I used to do all the time and now do only periodically, I've never had the luxury of receving HTML and CSS from the designer: only an image of the layout. I expect that's not entirely uncommon, that the...

Let's say that you want your Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) application to display an icon that it has downloaded, rather in the way that Internet Explorer displays icons on its tabs. The first step is to download the remote icon to a local file...

If you are hosting the WebBrowser ActiveX control in a native code application (perhaps following these instructions , then you may or may not have noticed that the control does not always resize correctly. Specifically, if you maximize the application...

... you so changed the world ... thanks for making lives like mine possible. RIP.

All of the samples I've found that show how to build a JSONP service using the Windows Communication Foundation have the thing hosted in IIS. IIS is literally the last place I want my Windows Communication Foundation services hosted ... especially because...

If one searches the Web for samples of how to integrate a desktop application with Windows Live, unfortunately one finds one's way to material that is out-of-date . So here is some code that works as of July 2011. The code is for a Windows Form that has...

I'm reading Stephen Levy's wonderful book about Google, In the Plex . In the account of the development of AdSense, an engineer explains the process of having software understand a Web page well enough to match its content with an advertisement. He says...

Selecting a Particular Home Page in Internet Explorer 9: I have 5 home pages that I add to Internet Explorer on every machine I use as a productivity workstation. In version 8, I routinely go over to the drop-down arrow next to the home icon and select...

I can't listen to Goldfrapp, The Ting Tings, and The Scissor Sisters exclusively. Goldfrapp's art, in particular, always absorbs my concentration. So I'm always on the lookout for stuff to have in the background. A few weeks ago, I had Escovedo's...

I recently had a case where a thread running under one identity would process data periodically provided by a thread running under a different identity. There are lots of ways of accomplishing this, but the priority for me was to do it in such a way that...

... is a book by Tomas Petricek and Jon Skeet. It's terrific. It succeeds not just as an introduction to functional programming and F#, but also as a simply excellent programming text. The reason it is superior is that the authors strived to teach...

Everyone. RIP Gerry Rafferty. Done too soon.

... Once I added a new location, set that as my Live Tile location, confirmed Live Tile update, and then deleted that location and set my original one as the Live Tile location. Phew.

... which explains why I find myself surprised that it has actually been clear and freezing in Sammamish, WA, for the past several days, rather than rainy and 7 Celcius as my phone has led me to expect.

Of the very many people I know who have Windows Phones, all of them except one opted for the Samsung Focus. The odd person out happens to be me, who chose the LQ Quantum. My choice was simple. The Quantum is the one with the hardware QWERTY keyboard...

Windows Phones, by definition, are equipped with an accelerometer for detecting the physical orientation of the device. Applications can subscribe to notifications from the operating system of orientation changes and adjust their layouts accordingly....

After nearly twenty-years, I'm always delighted when my wife treats us to her Santa cookies:

Software Engineering is Still a Risky Enterprise The problems in being able to produce and maintain software with predictable success were documented almost at the dawn of the profession, by Frederick Brooks, Jr., in his essay, “The Mythical Man...

I've been interested, recently, in improving my digital art skills from their current state of being entirely non-existent. As a developer, I wish to be capable of doing more attractive user interfaces for applications I'm mocking up. As an initial...

One of the features of Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager "2" is self-service password re-set. That feature sits on top of a generic facility of the Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager service that provides for multi-factor authentication. To explain...

I read a lot of spy fiction. I have observed that the sociology of an espionage organization, as depicted, especially by Len Deighton, is very similar to that of a software development enterprise. While I may expand on that observation in more detail...

Requests In the argot of Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager, a request is a request to perform some operation on resource or on all or some of the attributes of a resource. The resource to which a request refers is generally known as the target...

Reading Judith Barker's excellent Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle That Made England , I came across what is, in effect, an early fifteenth-century Dilbert cartoon. Barker, in discussing the strategic logistical planning for the Agincourt campaign, which...

A startling proportion of our team, including myself, are Canadians, either by birth, or, like me, by naturalization. Also, two of the products that Microsoft purchased and are now incorporated into Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager "2"--the synchronization...