There have been several questions on the DSL Tools forum about how to set shapes at specific locations when they're create. That type of custom placement that is definitely possible to do in our diagrams. Our modeling system has a feature called Rules...

Vivek has a project where he's written the interop layer to access the Windows shell's 'Open With' Dialog -- the one where you can associate a file extension with the application that should open it. It's a dialog that you may find useful in one of your...

Microsoft Research has created a cool new UI plug-in for Windows Desktop Search, called Phlat , that does much better querying and filtering and seemlessly integrate search and browse functionality. If you like Desktop Search, but want a better interface...

Doing design-time integration for components and controls is always a big request. Being able drop a control or component in something like the WinForms designer, lets developers visualize what things will look like as they change properties. The following...

Here's a great "workflow" diagram that shows how the VS 2005 Distributed System Designers can be used to produce service-oriented applications. It's quite useful, so if you're interested in seeing how the designers can be used, go check it out.

Here's a very cool sample that uses Managed DirectX to support input from the new XBox 360 controller in a simple Windows Form in C#. Paul Stubbs : MDX: XBOX 360 Controller Windows Forms Application [via Greg ]

Sameera has an interesting article on CodeProject about creating a Gradient Editor control that lets you pick the colors and attributes for a gradient fill. It's similar to features that you've probably seen in professional drawing applications, like...

I just ran into a problem doing this and found a great post about how to work around it. It appears that the MenuStrip doesn't support radio button items be default, but you can create a radio button effect by using the ToolStripMenuItem.Checked property...

Edward Bakker has a great blog that's largely about his adventures in using the DSL Toolkit to create some domain-specific languages. He's done an 18-post series so far on DSL Tools, ranging from just getting started and introductory information to creating...

Earlier in the week, I posted about a project that implemented system tray support for .NET applications. That seems like a good project, but it's a bit complicated. I was just trying to add this functionality to an app that I've been playing around...

I posted earlier about using the My namespace in VS 2005 to create a single instance application in C#. You can also do a similar thing to use the My functionality for displaying a splash screen when your .NET application is loading. Here is Tyler...

There was a question on our forums about how to set the end points of a Connector programmatically, rather than having them calculated dynamically. This is possible to do in DSL Tools with some custom code. You can set the FromEndPoint and ToEndPoint...

I saw these two posts on Greg's blogs, and they look very intriguing: FileHelpers and Screen Grabbing . These two libraries appear to be very useful - who doesn't need simplified file read/write functionality. And, the screen capture one is cool because...