Here's a tip on how to quickly add an existing folder to your Mesh. 1. Make sure Live Mesh is running, signed in, and the device has been added to your Mesh. (this is the basic stuff)   2. Select a folder in Finder and drag it to the Live Mesh icon...

If you didn't get a chance to go to PDC this past week, you can take a watch a bunch (all?) of the sesions over at MicrosoftPDC.com . Although I've only watched one so far (I'm working on this one right now), I will say I thoroughly enjoyed Daniel Moth...

I haven't been writing much here recently for a few reasons. 1. Seattle is *very* nice in the summer time. Why stay inside blogging when you can go to the Center for Wooden Boats in Lake Union , Pike Place market , or take a ferry to Bainbridge ? ...

A quick note : never say "crud" in a meeting if the thing you are speaking about has anything to do with reading or writing data. For example, I was just in a meeting when somebody said, "This does a lot of crud...there's all this crud here...". In...

Every person has a set of tools and whatnot for their development environment that they use & have grown accustomed to. For example, a couple of (publicly available) tools that I use day in and day out are TextPad and Beyond Compare . Another "tool"...

I downloaded some files from the internet the other day and it didn't have an installer. I copied them into my Program Files directory (I made a new folder), and created a shortcut to them. Unfortunately, every time I ran the application, I was confronted...

While I was doing some chores today, I began to have random musings about unit tests. It's strange how one's mind works while doing (mostly) manual labor. Separating Code Coverage by Target It's hard to get actual code coverage numbers for a specific...

I was randomly browsing XKCD the other day, and saw something funny. If you go to http://xkcd.com/405/ and click on the Previous button, you're taken to http://xkcd.com/403/ . If you click Next from there you're taken back to http://xkcd.com/405/ . If...

One of the items that I haven't found a whole lot of talk about online or in books is how to write a custom installer for Windows Mobile, so I'm going to briefly talk about how to set one up. Why would you want to do this? The reasons seem simple enough...

A few weeks ago, I noticed that some of my installs on my laptop started failing. I thought it was odd, but most of the things I install are pre-beta, so I figured that they hadn't yet started to support Windows Server 2008. Some things, out of beta,...

If you spend as much time as I do in Visual Studio TF, there are certain things you may find a tad bit frustrating : timeouts, connecting to the server, etc. Fortunately the Visual Studio guys/gals have come up with a set of power tools which you can...

I ran across this today from James Manning's blog and found it insanely useful. The default compare tool in Visual Studio TF is fine but I personally want some more features. If you have your own preferred compare tool, you can plug it in here: http...

So I may have missed this, but this is what I'm working on. http://www.microsoft.com/soa/products/oslo.aspx It's basically a bunch of stuff that ships in: - BizTalk Server "version 6" - System Center "version 5" - Visual Studio "version...

Note that there are tons of stories about backwards compatibility; for some of the best go see Raymond . For a sample application that I'm writing, I'm using .NET CF 3.5. I had upgraded from the version shipped with Visual Studio 2008 Beta2 to the one...

This is a question for those of you who write Windows Mobile applications (preferably managed, but native is fine too). We're developing a managed Windows Mobile application, and one of the issues we've run into is that we'd like to support both Smartphones...

This starts a new series (I hope) of performance tips that you may/may not know about. This post is brought to you by Microsoft Mobile Development Handbook , in which I found this gem. It's on page 217 at the bottom if you have the book. The basic idea...

In my own time, I've been learning Objective-C for fun. I'm not sure why, perhaps I didn't feel I spent enough time in front of a computer. But I digress. One of the interesting things I've learned is that the following code works. Note that I assume...

Stupid mistakes are often the most painful. Take the following sample code. public class Sample { private int [] array = new int[32]; private int x = 0; public int Foo() { return array[x]; } public int X { get { return this.x; } set { #if DEBUG if (value...

I read a really good article the other day over on Ars about Windows Vista and how stuff works under the covers in terms of how things draw on Windows Vista. It's a pretty easy read; it's true what they said. Unfortunately we didn't add in any more effects...

This post serves as somewhat as an intro into what a 3-tier architecture is and why it's used. Why is this important? Most enterprise applications these days are written in the three tier architecture form. And why the title? Zoolander is one of my favorite...

Hand over your wallet InfoCard! I've been playing around with CardSpace and trying to get it to do what I need it to do : authenticate some user in a little 3-tier play app that I'm writing. It's not as simple to use as most people would think. Here's...

Apparently I do things in the wrong order. Since my very first post on this blog didn't say who I am or what I do, I thought I should give some background into this mysterious subject. So here's my introduction. It starts off slow. My name is Todd...

While working on one of my side projects at work, I encounted something interesting with the % sign. The code that I'm going to talk about has nothing to do with any upcoming products -- it's simply a side project I'm working on in my free time that uses...