On the C# FAQ blog , there was a post on why reference parameter types aren't polymorphic. In the feedback section, there was some further confusion. Part of the problem is that the terminology is a bit confusing. You have variables that are reference...

Regulator is a regular expression testing tool. Roy Osherove blogs about the latest beta here . I haven't played with it much yet, but it looks like a great way search for regular expressions others have created, and test your regular expressions. Regular...

http://daringfireball.net has an interesting post on usability (and a follow up ) on usability. I agree this problem is hard. When you are immersed in something and understand its details inside and out, it's hard to design it in a way that's approachable...

Intego has a press release on a Mac Trojan Horse here . It seems they are trying frighten people into getting their product and it's likely not a real threat. The details are sketchy though. Whether or not this issue is real, I do think Mac OS X is as...

A fairly common question that comes up in mailing lists and other forums is “Why doesn’t Entourage use the Apple address book?” I’ll give you my take on that here. As a disclaimer, I want to make sure it’s clear that this...

The press release has gone out . Unless some horrible bug is found in the next couple of weeks, Mac Office 2004 should be out in May. Rick Schaut posts about some of the work done in Word 2004. As he mentions, Entourage 2004 does support have some support...

There have been a series of gripes on PC laptops here , here , and here . I thought I'd share some thoughts of my own. Since joining the Windows group, I've been carrying around both my Apple TiBook, and a new Dell Inspiron 8600. Yes, my bag is heavy...

Omar posted a history of Entourage and the journey to becoming an Office application . I knew it had to be Omar, since he misspelled becoming :-) As the development lead for OE 5 and then for Entourage 2001, I went through all of this with Omar. Mac...

As you know if you’ve been reading my previous blog entries is that I’m playing around with Outlook plugins. One thing that’s always bugged Outlook is that it always uses the reply style with the short header attribution like this: From...

Kevin Moore has a useful post on customizing where you end up when you launch Windows Media Player here . I still feel like such a novice on Windows some times. I still need to learn all the power user tricks. Just as long as I don't have to touch the...

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4641667/ You get 1 GB of storage, and fast searching (of course). This should be interesting.

In the feedback section of my post on a Hello World Outlook Add-in , Ron Cicotte mentioned a debugging problem he was having, and finally tracked it down after having to use an MSDN support incident. The problem is that if you have any disabled Outlook...

A common idiom I have come to appreciate in C++ is “ resource acquisition is initialization ”. The idea is that you acquire a resource in a constructor, and dispose of it in the destructor. Using a stack based class, you can make sure your...

WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) is Apple's yearly developer conference. The 2004 session descriptions are now available here , although the interesting sessions usually don't appear on the schedule until the first day when they make all their big...

As mentioned in my Introduction post , I've recently joined the team responsible for the people & groups platform on Longhorn. I was searching around to see what information is out there already on it. MSDN has a good overview article here . The PDC...

There's a new article on MSDN about WinFS that describes many of the key concepts including the different data types.

There is a new article on MSDN describing Avalon’s Media Integration Layer . The article provides insight into some of the key architectural features that differentiate it from other technologies. Earlier this month, Ian Griffiths also wrote about...

Michael Giagnocavo has an interesting blog entry on hashing that explains what salt values are and why you should do multiple iterations of hashing on stored passwords.

Jason Olsen has an interesting blog entry how XAML != HTML . I had some similar surprises when I first played with XAML too. At first I was expecting a cross between HTML and an XML version of something like PowerPlant's PPob format. However, what you...

They include an update to the Outlook Junk Mail Filter file, an Excel fix, and a Visio fix. Download here .

One thing I’d like to play with is extending Outlook through add-ins with C#. It’ll be a good opportunity to learn more about .NET development and the Windows tools. Plus, I can “fix” some of the things that annoy me about Outlook...

The first release candidate for Windows XP SP 2 is available here . The changes are described here . We've made a lot of major security related changes for SP 2. We can use all of the feedback we can get before it's rolled out to everyone. So, if you...

Here's an excuse to write about two things I love. Danny Elfman is doing music for the upcoming X-box game Fable . Danny Elfman was the lead singer for the best band of all time, Oingo Boingo .

Omar blogged about me! Dennis finally started a blog (or two ) that have RSS feeds. Now, I can actually read his blog. I had a lot of fun working with these guys over the years creating some awesome features! There's nothing working with a team of people...

There's now a slick online demo of Mac Office 2004 here . It includes a nice demo of the Project Center, which I talked about in my previous post .