Thanks to some great comments and a specific one from James I have now replaced notepade.exe with the vastly superior notepad2.exe and prevented Windows File Protection from replacing the new notepad. Here are the steps (warning, process with care...

From Roy Osherove . Notepad is one of the apps I use most on Windows. It's especially handy for removing formatting from text, storing quick snippets and so on. However, it was probably written in 1995 and hasn't changed since. Notepad2 is a FANTASTIC...

Check out the new BackgroundWorder component . This is so very cool. I've had to do similar things in at least 5 different projects I wrote in the past year. It's great that this stuff will be built into Windows Forms 2.0. It will sureley save me a bunch...

It was about 2 months ago that I started using the Getting Things Done system. First I bought the book , then I got the software , then I organized my life and now I'm a lot happier for it. LauraJ just wrote a post on how GTD has impacted her , and...

Wow, this is something I've always wanted on my PC. Jeyo Mobile Companion lets you send, receive, and generally manage your SMS messages on your Windows Mobile Smartphone. You can also manage your call history I just installed it and it seriously rocks...

As I just mentioned , there is a way to make Office documents open in their respective apps rather than IE. Since PDFs are quite common on the net I am always getting annoyed when they load in the browser for many of the same reasons I mentioned earlier...

One of my biggest gripes about Windows and Office is that when you click on a word, excel, or PowerPoint doc (or acrobat doc) in Internet Explorer, those documents render in the browser pane. This is one of the biggest usability issues I face with Windows...

iTunes 4.5 is out . Most interesting new features: Can import WMA files New format, Apple Lossless Welcome to the party. I rip all my audio as WMA Lossless cause I don't want no stinkin compression. However, I trancode all my audio to the...

Summary In this weeks’ installment of I hate COM , lets talk about a frustrating problem I’ve been having (turns out I had this problem when I wrote my Media Center Front Panel Display but found a different workaround I mention below)....

At long last, my PowerToy is live! Send to OneNote from Outlook lets you send Mail, Post items and Sticky Notes to OneNote (note, this was previously called Outlook2OneNote). While you are there I also recommend Send to OneNote from Internet Explorer...

Background Programming for Outlook using managed code is hard. I take that back. Programming for Outlook is relatively easy if you can figure out where to stick your code. Working out the problems you’ll encounter is hard (and I’m still...

The other day I was wondering where the AssemblyVersion build and revision numbers come from if you use the default synax in your AssemblyInfo files: // // Version information for an assembly consists of the following four values: // // Major Version...

Chris Pratley has a write up on OneNote SP1 Preview . This is a huge upgrade and has lots and lots of new features. I've been running it for a few months now and love it. Here are my favorites: Capture Screen Shots and Snippets. Scratch Out...

I've been working on an Outlook Add-in in C# using the Visual Studio Shared Add-in project. I referenced this article on how to create a custom icon for your button: Custom Button Faces in a Managed Code Add-in for the Microsoft Office System In addition...

I'm working on a cool Outlook .NET Add-in that target the Office 2003 PIAs. I just read this post from Brad Abrams that points to this new article which discusses designing Office XP add-ins and Office 2003 add-ins by using the .NET Framework. Well...

I've been meaning to get to this for a long time, and finally did. I created a GDN Workspace for Dictionary Tool for Tablet PC . This is a Tablet PC PowerToy that I released last year . It was the first .NET code I had ever written and a few months...

I've been using this for a few weeks and it's dammed cool. Check your RSS feeds while being a couch potato using Windows Media Center 2004. It even streams videos from feeds such as Channel 9 .

When I joined Microsoft this story was already very famous. There have been a few instances since then where people would reply to mysterious DLs saying take me off this and then the flury of replies. However, someone who has been here long enough usually...

It’s not often that a new Office application is born. That’s especially true on the Mac. This is a story about Entourage , a product that was called Alpaca for the longest time. I joined Microsoft in January 1999. At the time, the team I joined...

Update : I've been informed that using the method below can have significant consequences in the future. Using private reflection isn't a good idea because the private methods can change in the future and this code WILL BREAK . Be forewarned. Well...

Dennis just wrote about some laptop frustrations . I have to agree. I can't tell you how many times I've closed my laptop lid, placed it in my bag and opened it back up on the train a 30 minutes later to find the battery half drained. Since I refuse to...