Stephen Toub

I answered a question today where someone asked for an example of setting a low-level keyboard hook with C#. I actually have an example of doing so in my May 2006 MSDN Magazine article on Managed Debugging Assistants , but the example is purposefully...

My latest article for MSDN Online is now available at Fun with DVR-MS ! A bit on the long side, but in it I delve into working with DirectShow and DVR-MS files (the recorded television files generated by Windows Media Center) from managed code, and I...

I was asked earlier this week if I knew of any tools that would let one easily edit the metadata associated with a DVR-MS file. Specifically, the person wanted to edit the title and description of a recorded show. There may very well be such a tool out...

I finished the code for this project months and months ago, and I had every intention of writing a full MSDN article describing the ins and outs of what I’d accomplished, but time seems to have gotten away from me. Rather than let the code languish any...

Back in early 2005, I wrote an article for MSDN on implementing add-ins for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 . As part of that article, I implemented an add-in that made it easy to jump around in a recorded TV show, video, or music file using the...

I received an email from MSDN Magazine subscriber Oren Novotny thanking me for my preview handler article in the January 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine . Oren also wondered whether a tool could be written to make it easy to edit preview handler registrations...

After my last post on implementing low-level keyboard hooks in C# , Soumitra asked if it was possible to implement a low-level mouse hook in C#, too. Sure. Here is an example that will print out the location of the mouse every time you press the left...

Back in May , I wrote an article for the Office Developer Center on MSDN on an idea I had for creating Outlook Calendar Providers (and later demonstrated how to write an additional provider for this to allow Windows XP Media Center 2004 recording schedules...

Today, the Media Center team released Update Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (you may have heard of the update referred to previously as "Emerald"). Update Rollup 2 includes a plethora of modifications to improve the stability, reliability...

Several years ago, I wrote an article for MSDN on programming against the DVR-MS file format. I'm very pleased with how well the article was received, and to this day I get a lot of people writing to me about the article. Unfortunately, recently the article...

An article I recently wrote for MSDN online just went live: An ASP.NET Framework for Human Interactive Proofs It's always fun when that happens :)

One of the features I've wanted for a while now in Media Center is the ability to easily jump around within media. I have a bunch of family home videos on my machine, and it can be frustrating to navigate to particular moments that I want to show to family...

I've received some very nice feedback on my DVR-MS article ... I'm glad people are finding it so informative! I did want to call out one thing about the sample code. Buried in the middle of the article (when discussing WmvConverter) is a sentence:...

I'm sure I'm not alone in that I keep a laundry list of personal coding projects I want to work on when I get free time. Most of them are fairly short and only take a few hours to complete. We finished work on the June issue of MSDN Magazine yesterday...

Found this on the web this morning... it's almost scary how true this really is. I almost never ask a question these days before first doing a well-crafted google search or two.

I have been playing around with this concept for quite a while and finally decided to put it down in an article on MSDN: Custom Calendar Providers for Outlook 2003 Outlook 2003 has really cool integration with SharePoint in that it can consume SharePoint...

Update (10/14/2005): MediaState.dll in the new SDK released today is signed. You can download it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1D836C29-ABD5-4FDD-90C5-5C5ABAE97DB4&displaylang=en . The Media State Aggregation Service...

In many concurrent systems, one thread performs some work, the result of which another thread consumes. This producer/consumer pattern is frequently implemented on top of blocking queues. If you examine the behavior of System.Collections.Queue and...

Did you know it's possible to customize the test page auto-generated for Web services in ASP.NET? For example, let's say you wanted to order the WebMethods such that they're displayed in alphabetical order. You can modify the DefaultWsdlHelpGenerator...

Anton asked about design-time editing for the Words property (a StringCollection) of my ImageHipChallenge control . It's a good question. I actually intended to adorn the property with [Browsable(false)] so that the property wouldn't show up in the PropertyGrid...

I'm happy to announce that the code for Microsoft Sudoku for the Tablet PC and Ultra-Mobile PC is now available for download at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=C0461E1A-BD6A-4B21-A199-D3D4F9D79CF7 Note that the download includes...

First, a bit of history on MSJ, as taken from the MSJ archive at http://www.microsoft.com/msj/: Microsoft Systems Journal was the first programming publication from Microsoft. Predating the Windows operating system, MSJ covered MS-DOS internals beginning...

Several months ago I updated my "Time Travel with Windows Media Center" article to be based on Windows Vista rather than on Windows XP. It's now online! If you're interested in writing background add-ins for Media Center, check it out at http://msdn2...

For my article on preview handlers in the January 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine , I wrote a sample preview handler for previewing PDF files. This allows you to view PDF files in Outlook and in the Vista shell just as you would other document types for which...

I've received a bunch of emails over the past week from people asking if I have a version of Sudoku.exe that runs on non-Tablet PCs. I tell them yes, and I tell them that they do, too :) Sudoku.exe references and uses types from Microsoft.Ink.dll,...