I can't even begin to explain how happy I am that we recently released the Office 2003 PIA download . Why am I excited? Just read this and you will understand. I've known about this for a while but I had to keep my mouth shut :-). Not being able to install the PIAs is the single biggest deployment...

David Weller discusses what it's like to program on a Mac. Back when I was a Mac user, I desperately wanted to write some programs. The barrier to entry was huge. I didn't know C++, didn't know Java, and still don't know Objective C (and don't care to ever learn). There was AppleScript and that is where...

I love SmugMug so much I wanted a really easy way to get my pictures from my hard drive to SmugMug . Enter Send to SmugMug . This application will install a little entry in your contextual menu for folder that says... "Send to SmugMug". When you select this, the contents of the folder (.jpg only) are...

Agrhhhhh! This is why I hate computers sometimes. Based on this post that I saw a few days ago I enabled the Indexing Service on Windows XP. Well all of a sudden I started getting: Parser Error Message: Access is denied: [name of .dll here] When debugging dasBlog. For 2 freaking hours I tried...

As I promised , here is the code for the MovableType Blacklist that I wrote for dasBlog. There are three pieces to it: the IBlackList interface The MovableTypeBlacklist class The Factory Class that holds an instance of the MovableTypeBlacklist and the ReferralUrlBlacklist Feel free to...

Sometimes I wonder if I was supposed to be a programmer. My job at Microsoft does not require that I write any code... that's not what Program Managers do. Instead I do all sorts of other stuff, but I enjoy it a great deal. However, sometimes all the context switching from multi tasking KILLS me. I mean...

Well, just in time for a wave of referral spam that is hitting my blog (mostly from http://www.ownsthis.com ) I spent part of today writing a class that can consume the Movable Type Blacklist . The class will allow you to download this file from the server periodically (no more than once a day). I have...

I'm pretty excited about Nullable Types in Whidbey. The primary reason I care about this is that in my PhotoLibrary (library that exposes EXIF properties of a picture) has lot of value types like int. One neat thing about the class is that using something like a PropertyGrid you can just point it at...

Part 2 of 2 Bug 2: TrackingHandler Thread Dies Another problem that Scott Hanselman informed me of was that he would frequently stop receiving Trackbacks, Pingbacks and Referrals on his posts. Furthermore, it was intermittent. This was troubling since losing a Trackback means it's lost forever...

Recently I found the answer to two very hard questions about bugs in dasBlog. They were kinda tricky to figure out, but also really interesting (bug 2 will be in a follow up post) Bug 1: DateTime.ToString() One of the classes in dasBlog that stores information like Comments, Trackbacks and Pingbacks...

Some might tell you that you never need to call Marhal.ReleaseComObject when writing managed code in Outlook. Well there are two very specific situations in which you must call RCO or else you will encounter problems. They are: You create toolbar buttons in new Inspector windows You use the...

A while ago I lamented that the “Clean Project” button in VS.NET did nothing for .NET projects. I thought that it would be nice to have something that would empty the bin, obj, and setup folders of crusty stuff, or just nuke it if you plan on zipping your source to email to some one. There is really...

I find it creepy that it's a million times easier to write managed code against iTunes than Windows Media Player. That just seems wrong. A few weeks ago when I was playing with the iRiver H320 I wanted to sync meta data from WMP to the iRiver so that I could browse by artist and album. Well the problem...

One very frustrating thing about programming with the .NET Compact Framework is that it's quite limited in how much integration capabilities you have with the device. It's very good if you build a little application that doesn't need to hook into the device, or hook into Outlook, but as soon as you want...

A few months ago I encountered a significant performance problem with System.Drawing.Imaging . I found that by using the new Method performance was 93x faster (on average) for loading jpegs. You can download the update here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a8f5654f-088e...

Donovan has posted a preview of the managed OneNote API that I collaborated on. Donovan did most of the heavy lifting and is the papa of the actual Data Import API in OneNote. The managed interface that we worked on provides a very rich way to interact with OneNote using C# or VB.NET. This is what my...

I have released my Media Center Front Display Panel SDK . You can find API documentation here . This is an SDK that I created to give you a managed API and State Aggregator to get notified of state from the Media Center State Aggregator Service. If you have a Windows Media Center 2004 machine you...

Ok, recently I posted an article titled: Programming for Outlook using managed code is hard . This article summarized and documented some of the pain that I experienced in writing my Outlook2OneNote Add-in . All this time I was aware that there was another route I could take, one that Dan Crevier...

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 of time.

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). It would be nice if there were a KB article on this...

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 working on them). I’ll try and give you some...

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 // Minor Version // Revision // Build Number /...

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 to this article, most of the information I...

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 imagine my horror when I read this: You may...

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 ago I went back in there and fixed a few bugs, and...