Please join me in welcoming the rest of the MSCOM Operations Team to the world of blogging. Stop by, have some coffee and leave them a comment to let them know you care. -S

Hi, Eric here again. A question came in to us, via email, to my post about "shelling" in .NET. I thought I would respond with a new blog entry to share with the community. The question was: From: Andreas Sent: Friday, July 22, 2005 7:13 AM Hi Eric...

A couple of months ago, after I had just installed the then-new Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 , I could not run any project in the IDE, as it would crash VS. Then I found a workaround using a Visual Studio community feature that I built for MSDN Forums :...

As anyone who reads our little corner of the world knows, it's been a while. Now I could make excuses that we have been busy or we lost the password or dingos ate our blog, but in truth, we simply haven't taken the time to do it. It's funny, we all have...

Some time ago I posted with respect to creating a facility for automating the MOM service account password change process. I did indeed complete the program, which can be summarized as follows: Expose a UI for collecting the Configuration Group and credential...

Sometimes we are just so focused on the task at hand, we miss some really cool stuff right under our noses. Microsoft is such a big place, many times you don't hear about great work being done around the company by other teams. Recently, I was asked to...

Maybe many of you out there in Developer Land are already aware of this, but I need to point out that you can indeed shell, sleep, and SendKeys using the new fancy C# and .NET Framework. You see, a few months ago, I needed to come up with a quick and...

This code (actually, code very much like it) made it through development and test (in a different team; we never make mistakes,) and worked beautifully. In production, however, it was an utter failure. It isn't difficult to spot the problem; can you?...

For many years I have been pretty heavily involved in the gaming industry . Through scores of beta tests, to assisting in the design of scalable systems for third generation MMORPGs to writing reviews and conducting interviews I’ve been in, out and around...

Ah, the holidays. For people in most operations organizations, there is a collective sigh of relief around this time of year. Not only are many of the people who are responsible for releasing changes out into the production environment on vacation (or...

After owning a digtial camera for a year and a half, I now have about 6000 photo files , which have swamped my old home computer's 16GB harddisk. So on the day after Thanksgiving, popular for shopping, I considered going to Fry's to buy an external harddisk...

I was recently working on a thermometer control and decided to write a temperature class to go along with it. What I found interesting is that there are temperature systems that I had never even heard of let alone used (namely Reaumer and Rankine). I...

The entertainment industry is a funny business. It is completely dependant on the random whims of consumers. That is not to say that the success of a product is unpredictable, simply that there are a great many factors involved in design, development...

Hello, there. I'm Eric, a brand new addition to the Microsoft.com Operations Tools Team. As a part of beaming into the team, I thought I would try the team weblog. For the subject of my first post, I will keep it relatively light: playing chess. I have...

I have recently encountered a situation where my code was receiving objects sent, via a scoping event, from code on another thread. These "scope" objects require my code to change state to reflect the object received. This resulted in my code receiving...

It's probably no big surprise to anyone that I happen to love Microsoft and our products. I'm also the first to say that neither we or our products are perfect. But too often, we get beat up over issues with our software and our competition or the media...

Several months back, my significant other decided to leave the fold of Microsoft to branch out on her own as an ISV specializing in tools for developers. This week she launched her first product, Agent Aware for Windows and while I may be a little biased...

For those of you who like certain control classes to open in the code view (instead of the designer view) by default. You can use the following attribute on your class so when you double click on it you get the code view. [System.ComponentModel...

Or has hell officially frozen over? In case you haven’t heard, and I can’t imagine anyone living in modern America who hasn’t heard, the Boston Red Sox have buried more than 80 years of pain and finally clenched a World Series Championship. And I find...

I thought I'd get in on the recent sports commentary theme. :-) I'm Canadian, and as such, I am attuned to the pulse of ice hockey whether I like it or not. It really sucks not having any NHL hockey to watch on television, and it looks like we're going...

Recently my boss handed me the challenge of designing and developing an application that would handle the task of end to end hardware order fulfillment. I can tell by the collective groan that those of you working in large companies and organizations...

At least for me in terms of the NFL. My all-time favorite player has made his way to Seattle to play for the Seahawks. Yes, Jerry Rice will wear the coveted #80 ( eternal thanks to Steve Largent ) for Seattle. Having grown up in the San Francisco Bay...

For me, the pain and pleasure of programming with C# and .NET can be best represented by the default DataGrid control for Windows Form. On it’s face the DataGrid control is functional, useful and performs well. A data source can easily be bound to the...

finally has a championship team. It’s only been 25ish years since Seattle has been able to boast of a national championship in professional sports. But us sports fan in Seattle should really take a moment to celebrate this feat, after all, it may be another...

"Blog," he said. Not being a big fan of PDAs (Public Displays of Acumen) I proffer the handiest excuse and fix my resolve back to the work at hand. "Blog!" he then exhorted. That Scott. So funny. What profundities do I have to offer that the world so...