The folks at Trivium Technologies have released the first version of their MSBuild Sidekick , a GUI front end to MSBuild. Even though this tool probably cannot replace the productivity that I can currently attain by taking advantage of the Intellisense...

It took them a long time, but the folks at MSDN finally got around to publishing the second part of my ColorPicker.NET article . In this one, I cover the implementation details for the scrolling magnifying glass control and the zoom panel that is used...

One of the great things about the new ASP.NET GridView control is that it allows you to implement column field sorting with relative ease, at least in comparison to what you would have had to do to attain similar functionality in earlier versions. There...

I ran into a rather mysterious error when working with some SQL code today. Incorrect syntax near '[Insert Arbitrary Column Name]' Before I get to the nuts and bolts of the problem, we'll start with some background details. The stored procedure that...

My latest ASP.NET coding endeavor required that I perform a postback and then transfer control over to a different page (primarily for URL concealment purposes) using Server.Transfer . I needed to be able to pass values from the source page to the target...

Microsoft recently posted the preliminary Windows Vista UX guidelines. These guidelines contain information on What’s New in Windows Vista, design principles, guidelines for controls, text, windows, and aesthetics. They will help designers and developers...

I just came across XAMLShare , a public wiki dedicated to providing various Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) code samples. There aren't many samples at the time, but hopefully the number will grow as WPF works its way into the mainstream.

Another great blog entry by Jessica Fosler: Keeping your UI Responsive and the Dangers of Application.DoEvents .

One of the most common questions I've been asked in recent weeks has been in regards to creating a data grid column style that supports text wrapping. It's really unfortunate that the DataGrid control does not provide this type of functionality, and even...

I had a few cycles today so I spent some time fixing some bugs in ColorPicker.NET .

The transcripts for the MSDN Designing .NET Class Libraries class that Brad Abrams coordinated a few months back have finally been posted.

If you've frustratingly encountered the " <UICulture> should be set in the project file in order to support the following markup files that use types defined in this project " error message in Avalon, Tim Sneath has come to the rescue with a temporary...

Amir Khella shows how easy it is to create stunning visual effects in Avalon in his Playing Around with Avalon's Grid entry. Amazing!

I just came across David Fetterman's article on MSDN covering the new recommendations for using strings in .NET v2.0 . It's definitely worth a quick read.

I'm working on finishing up the code for the next release of ColorPicker.NET . The main focus of this release is on incorporating the screen pixel sampling functionality that so many people have requested. While working on the design, I decided that I...

Nick Kramer , one of the Program Manager leads over in Windows Client (Avalon) has been blogging answers to various questions that have been asked about the Avalon infrastructure. He's also looking for some feedback on how we can make the Avalon oriented...

via TheServerSide.net: Ian Griffiths on his upcoming Avalon book and more .

via Paul Laudeman: Ensure that an user can run only one instance of your application at a time .

After completing a three-month work-related project that devoured just about every minute of my life, I had some time to polish off ColorPicker.NET. Check out the web site to get the latest source and binaries.

Troy Simpson was nice enough to point out and provide a fix for some visual inconsistencies with the horizontal scroll bar when resizing the DataGrid in the solution that I supplied with the DataGrid Q&A #2 post a few months ago. Thanks, Troy.

This is an excel lent resource that manifests optimal practices for designing icons for your Windows applications.

Joe Duffy has posted an update to the Dispose, Finalization and Resource Management section of the .NET design guidelines. I agree with Keith Brown 's assertion that this is an intricate topic that should be understood by anyone writing class libraries...

Someone e-mailed me the other day and told me that the Sano.Utility project wasn't included with the ColorPicker.NET source that was released with my recent article . This was completely unintentional. I'm in the process of updating the MSI, but if you...

My latest article on MSDN discusses the functionality involved in some of the custom controls that were created for ColorPicker.NET. As promised earlier, I've made the source code for the application available through the article. As always, constructive...

I've fixed the problem with the cursor clipping region in ColorPicker.NET that was causing the dual-monitor issue reported by several people. Some really cool features are just around the corner, including an article on the Smart Client Developer Center...