If there's one thing that puts me off an application, it's when it unnecessarily inserts itself into the Windows startup process so that it can have its very own system tray icon from whence it can spam me with annoying messages. Obviously it makes sense...

I posted in June about the wonderful New York Times reader application, written entirely in WPF. I'm delighted that this is now available for public download . Scott Hanselman calls it WPF's first killer app . Ryan Stewart from ZDNet says it shows off...

The awesome guys from the Windows Vista Magazine revealed a great Windows Vista secret recently that I wanted to bring to a broader audience. When you're browsing around the file system in Explorer, it's often useful to be able to quickly switch between...

On a more practical note than my last blog posting , I want to encourage everyone to check out the Windows Vista compatibility cookbook . Despite our best efforts, there will always be some breaking changes between releases of an operating system, particularly...

We go to fairly extreme lengths to try to maintain compatibility with older applications, as Raymond Chen's blog often demonstrates in vivid fashion. As an example of this, some of you may remember seeing Jim Allchin's demonstration of Visicalc (the earliest...

If you're doing a fresh install of Windows Vista, you'll probably use a bootable DVD so that you're able to reformat the system partition. But sometimes you might find yourself in a situation where you could really use a command prompt as you go through...

Saw this posted on one of the internal forums today, and I thought this was something that was worth sharing. If you're a keyboard junkie, you'll love this. Do you have a few applications that you're always firing up? Would you like a system-wide keyboard...

If you're a reader of this blog, I'm going to take a low-risk gamble and assert that you probably consider yourself a power user. You pride yourself in the responsibility of having full and absolute control over your machine environment and anything that...

Over the last week or so, I've had a couple of people point out some cool videos of WPF that have been posted up, so I thought I'd collate these for your interest and entertainment. If you want to be wowed by some of the cool things people are doing with...

The Start menu got a big overhaul in Windows Vista, with a number of significant changes made as a result of usability testing and research. One of the nicest innovations to my mind is the search bar at the bottom, which searches through your programs...

Ever wanted to copy a link from a network file share into an email, and wound up having to traverse the path, click on the address bar, copy the details out, paste it in and then type the filename itself (with the appropriate quotation marks? With Windows...

I don't know about your workflow as a developer, but I often find myself switching back and forward between an Explorer window and the command shell. For example, sometimes I'm looking around the filesystem for a project that I created a while back and...

Perhaps this is ironic for someone who has a heavy focus on beautiful client interfaces, but I've always been a bit of a command-line junkie. Maybe it's a fetish, maybe it's just a legacy of the early DOS, VAX/VMS and UNIX systems that I used in my formative...

It took a couple of extra days, but the Visual Studio and Expression tools are now ready with compatible versions available for Windows Vista RC1 and .NET Framework 3.0 RC1. For ease of access, I'm posting the full set of URLs here. Download these and...

In large software development projects, the end-game is often compared to the act of landing a plane. Specifically, the number of active bugs (those that haven't been fixed or closed as by design) is usually relatively flat during the early beta stages...