I recently was writing a video player in Silverlight 2 beta 2 and there was a requrement that when you hit PLAY on one player, all the others stopped. That's fine, I thought, I'll just create a static list and add each instance to the list in the constructor...

Thanks to Simon Middlemiss, you need a new ClientAccessPolicy.xml file with Silverlight 2 Beta 2 if you are going to access web services. Also your URL MUST not contain underscores (eg MyApp_Web was the default for Beta 1). Just rename your website in...

I just bought a new XBox 360 Premium yesterday (15-March-2008) and when I got it home I thought I'd make sure I had the newer Falcon 65 nanometer technology unit. I found an article which said shine a flashlight into the bottom and if you can see a copper...

I recently bought a Parrot Bluetooth Sound System which is a pair of speakers with their own amplifiers, connected to the PC with Bluetooth. http://www.parrot.com/usa/products/parrotsoundsystem There don't seem to be many reviews about this product...

Our team has been busy building a new website www.t5m.com that went live last week! I think it is pretty cool, using Silverlight 1.0 and about 4000 lines of Javascript plus lots of ASP.NET and Ajax. Its a video magazine that posts interview snippets...

There seems to be a bug in Windows Server 2003 R2 that if you try to repair your system after hardware changes you get the error message "This copy of Windows must be activated with Microsoft before you can proceed" when you try and login, but when you...

Hi! Only 6 months between blog posts! Sorry, I've been pretty maxxed. I've been hunting around for the utlimate laptop to run WPF applications on Vista. We have produced some pretty heavy WPF demos in the UK that make a lot of use of WPF 3D, for...

Recently had this very funny Microsoft take on the Da Vinci code forwarded to me. It is quite long but very funny. http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2006/06/the_microsoft_c_6.html No I don't know anything about 8/2110! Cheers, Paul

If you get this error when you try and hibernate your laptop, chances are you have 2GB of RAM or more and you've hit a Windows bug. Try searching for the following hotfix and installing it. WindowsXP-KB909095-x86-ENU.exe

I wanted to print a visual out to an XPS file on a recent project, and couldn't find the code to do it. Anyway I eventually found it so I thought I'd post it. You need references to ReachFramework and System.Printing. using System.Windows.Xps.Packaging;...

I just finished an article on dragging and dropping files into Windows Explorer that I've posted on CodeProject. I've been a member of CodeProject for years and I reckon its a great place to get code. I wanted a sample that allowed you to drag and...

Got involved with building a WPF application to show off the BBC's Integrated Media Player (iMP). The idea is that if you miss a TV program on the BBC, you can download it to your PC and watch it up to a week afterwards. The project was a real success...

I've just finished a project to do a music download service (a bit like iTunes) for HMV. HMV are one of the largest music retailers in the UK, with a strong presence in Japan and Canada. It was quite a lot of fun, although very short timescales. We...

I've been working with WPF (Avalon) recently and found some strangeness with the MediaElement control not displaying any video, or displaying a black screen or throwing a COM exception. Turns out you need to update dxva2.dll and evr.dll as they are...

I lashed out on a 30" Dell screen the other day. It is just great, and absolutely enormous! I still have some slight sparkling green dots on the display when showing some images, but I'm working with ATI to get that resolved. The screen has a res...

Hi! I'm Paul Tallett, and I work in Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) in the UK. I specialise in UI development, and I'm a UI Dev Lead or Principal Consultant. I thought I needed a Blog to host some tips and tricks as I find them. Cheers...