How is it that one can bond so well with a machine? It’s not as if it is a person with likes and dislikes, habits and vices. It does not comfort you when you’re down, laugh at your jokes or feel pride in your accomplishments. It’s just...

We’ve launched a technical preview program for the upcoming Windows XP Service Pack 2. This is a comprehensive service pack that benefits everyone, and if you’re responsible for deployment in your organization, you owe it to yourself to check...

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...

I didn't actually watch the whole super bowl. I watched some of the first half, and walked away as soon as the half time show started to make a phone call. The call lasted through the half time show, and pretty much through the second half, and I got...

I'll be the first one to admit I'm lazy. I purposefully avoid meaningless manual labor. Things done solely to look better or or impress others generally fall into the category of meaningless. In high school I was socially adept enough to realize I wasn...

As Jimmy Carter used to do, I consult my daughter Yasmin on many an issue of great and deep importance. The subject this weekend was why computers crash, have bugs, and all that sort of stuff. I made a bold statement because I wanted to see where we could...

I made it my weekend project to hack up an editor for code snippet files. If you don't know what code snippets are, you should check out these two entries by Shaykat and Anson . Shaykat provides a good overview of them in general and Anson touches on...

In a response to my first blog entry on IE in XP SP2, Tom Gilder notices another new security prompt on downloaded files for XP SP2: Also, whilst on the subject of XP SP2, if you download a signed EXE to the desktop and run it, it gives you a security...

Since Friday Windows XP SP2 Release Candidate 1 is available for download . If you are an ISV or Software Developer located in Germany and you are planning to test XP SP2 RC1 please feel free to contact me via this blog. I’m interested in your feedback...

In a comment to my old VSTO security blog entry, Enrico Sabbadin asks why we can't just remove the Zone evidence from an assembly before creating the AppDomain. Good question, and Siew Moi bugged me about blogging this a long time ago as well, so I guess...

One of the more interesting things I worked on during the past few months was the development of a new “wireless“ icon for Windows. I found it a fascinating process and I thought it would be illuminating to share what we go through. Icons are interesting...

I believe most people have a love/hate relationship with the ads that they are barraged with. Having an Ultimate TV device means I’m not always up on the latest in advertising. For the most part I now live my life in blissful ad free ignorance....