I was playing Robozzle with my oldest and he was having a blast and loved that he was programming like Dad does. (He did let me know he wants to be policeman though. :) It’s a fun way to introduce kids to programming and reminds me a little of the little...

The hypervisor support in Server 2008 is now out in beta and it's great to see the product hitting the street.  Virtualization is a huge change for the industry that can do a lot for everyone from data-centers to software houses, to people who just...

Well, fun times.  I've taken a position on the Virtual Machine Manager team.  I'll be one of the lead developers working on the next version.  It's an exciting space, with a lot of players and a lot of new technologies. I'm also hiring...

I've noticed that a number of different programs just look at the Approved list of shell extensions [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Shell Extensions\Approved] and figure that all shell extensions will be in that list. It...

I've been thinking about the registration problem where you want to add a context menu (much of this applies to static verbs as well) to a file type (we'll say .ogg). You don't want the default verb, you just want to add some verbs. Because you don't...

So... I've been looking more closely at Wix and I think I'm going to build some custom actions to do a really good job installing shell extensions. Which ones do you find most problematic? I realize this is a bit of a change of pace for the blog, so I...

(Normally this kind of post is reserved for my other blog where I mostly blog about non-tech - so don't worry, I won't be boring you with stories of how incrediby smart and cute my little boys are (obviously my wife's DNA is doing overtime).) We've...

Let's say you want to install a few things and want UAC to stop bugging you while you install them. Should you turn off UAC and install the apps? Since that disables UAC's virtualization, it can destabilize things that depend on data written to those...

One of my favorite features of WinDbg is that it doesn't load all the symbols up-front. That's a huge part of what makes it so much faster than Visual Studio. However, every once in a while you can do things that cause WinDbg to go crazy and load all...

The problem is to skip out of a kernel driver that we don't have symbols for - what's the best way to break on calls out of that driver. If you used pc (step until the next call instruction), you would hit calls that are inside that driver. Here's another...

I've looked at this a couple times , but here's another way to break when the error code you're looking at is being returned. .while(@eax != 0xc0000005) { t ; reax } If you want to avoid the output noise, you can do something like this: .while(@eax !...

Here's a question that came up a work a little bit back - thought I would share the result around. There is a coding pattern (that I don't ever really use so I may be messing it up) that works like this: T1 res1; T2 res2; T3 res3; res1 = GetRes1...

The goal I think that most things don't need to require a UAC prompt to install - just install it for that user. Why not make the MSI so it doesn't prompt and your users get a smoother experience? (Also, I feel much better installing a program that...

Update: Please refer to Aaron's FAQ which is being maintained while this post has grown stale This question has come up a fair amount lately. The short answer is that you don't * - instead you should: first launch an unelevated process have...

I mentioned recently that I was the new owner of the UAC UI (from the dev side). Well, today I found that Raymond Chen's blog has brought up the topic of what the colors mean. I hadn't even really noticed that the dialogs changed much before taking ownership...

Here's a great tool for folks that use Visual Studio with large projects - it gives you a flat view of all the files in your solution. Quick word-wheeling allows you to filter down to a set of files and get at exactly what you're interested in. It's now...

I've moved onto the Windows Experience team. It should a lot of fun to continue to follow Guided Help, and some of my other projects but my emphasis now is on the Windows Experience - things like explorer and the like. I'm also the new owner of the LUA...

How cool is that - we're releasing Virtual PC 2007 as a free download . Why should you care? Here's the things I've found Virtual PC to be useful for: Putting a working server/client/multitier configuration on a laptop for demoing Testing/debugging setup...

Scott, Jerry, Thayn and I have whipped up a sample of indexing the registry, as well as a shell folder (namespace extension) for viewing it. It's great to be able to search the registry via the index and it's great sample of how to create a shellfolder...

On a recent post about BITSAdmin , someone commented on how you needed to be logged into passport to download certain things. Well I noticed in Brian's blog that there is now an alpha release of the live client SDK . I haven't tried it out (still busy...

Hi all - I'm at BYU for the career fair tomorrow (Wednesday). Come on down and talk to us and bring a resume - I met a lot of you at the dinner tonight (thanks for coming) which was great fun. We're also going to be doing some mock technical interviews...

While reading blog comments about Welcome Center, I came across this entry on how to remove welcome center at first boot. ... With a simple .reg file though, you can kill Windows Welcome Center dead on first boot — simply put the following into...

I was just looking at the Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista video. Wow. It's gorgeous. It's nice to see people doing amazing things with Avalon/WPF. I was particularly impressed with the great flow and visual as you select the background color (pictured...

From Bernie's review of Windows Vista's killer features ... Guided Help and Automated Diagnostics -- A large number of help desk calls are for simple technical issues that aren't difficult to resolve but are somewhat time consuming to explain to a remote...

I was taking a smile spotting survey that I found from Kathy Sierra's blog (good reading) and I know a little bit about how to tell a fake smile from a real one (in theory) and I thought it would be fun to see how good I was at it. At the beginning, I...