I put in the Alan Parsons Live In Madrid DVD again the other day, and I noticed a couple of subtle Pink Floyd references.  I was probably extra-sensitive to those because I had listened to Pulse and In The Flesh before.

During the "spooky" section of Psychobable, you can vaguely hear (and see) the drummer whispering into his mike.  He's saying things like "There's no reason to be afraid of dying, you gotta go sometime".  And I can't shake the feeling that this version of the spooky section sounds suspiciously like On The Run.  Both snippets are taken from Dark Side Of The Moon, on which Alan Parsons was the sound engineer.

The second is at the start of Sirius: the guitarist plays the typical "ploing-Ploing-ploing-plooing" from Shine On You Crazy Diamond (on Wish You Where Here).  As far as I know, Alan Parsons was not involved with that album, however.

Maybe this has been possible for some time, but I finally got the combination of ReSharper, DXCore and GhostDoc to co-exist peacefully on my Vista machine.  I'm using:

• Resharper 3.0.2
• DXCore 2.5.10
• GhostDoc 2.1.2

Why is this important: it enables me to use CR_Documentor, giving a very nice almost real-time preview of XML comments in a tool window.  This is important for XML comment fetishists like me.

I started experiencing a Cryptographic failure while signing assembly: Unknown error (8013141c) after moving my Visual Studio 2005 solutions to Visual Studio 2008.  The reason: I'm using strongly named assemblies, and I was running Visual Studio 2005 as Administrator.  Visual Studio 2008 does not require me to run as Administrator, so I use it with my normal user account.

Now unfortunately, this normal user account doesn't have the appropriate permissions needed to access the folder that contains the cryptographic key containers.  Here's how to fix this (on Windows Vista):

1. Open C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA in Windows Explorer  (ProgramData is a hidden folder)
2. Right-click on MachineKeys and click Properties
3. Click on the Security tab
4. Click on the Advanced button
5. Click on Edit (you'll have to elevate or provide administrator credentials here)
6. Click on Add
7. Enter Debugger Users in the Enter to object name to select field
8. Click Check Names
9. Click OK
10. Allow Full Control
11. Click OK
12. A couple of error messages appear, click to close them
13. Click OK
14. You're good to go

You should probably investigate whether you can get away with less than Full Control, though.

(*) "High" as in "more than 96"

I have a frustrating issue with VS2008 on my Vista machine, but luckily I found a solution.

Here's the issue: As long as my Windows DPI settings are set to the default of 96 DPI, everything is fine.  But when I set the DPI settings higher, things start to go wrong.  With “wrong” I mean:

• Some fonts in the IDE are larger than others
• Popup menus appear in the wrong place, sometimes partly outside the screen area
• Intellisense menus appear at seemingly random positions all over the screen
• Team Explorer is only useable with keyboard commands, since mouse-clicks and mouse-hovers arrive at wrong places on screen.

The frustrating thing is that for a non-WPF application, the “old” VS2005 behaved surprisingly well at higher DPI settings.  Somehow MS screwed this up with Orcas.

This means: VS2008 is practically unusable on the notebook screen of my Dell Inspiron M65, which has a 150 DPI panel.  My Samsung 204B external monitor has a 100 DPI panel, but using a 96 DPI setting makes everything small.  In fact, I like to use a setting of 120 DPI to give letters a comfortable size.

And now for the solution: buried within a comment on an entry from Scott Guthrie's blog, a fellow calling himself Deepak gives a solution: disable display scaling:

Turning off display scaling (from right click devenv -> properties -> compatibility tab in Vista) brings back things to normal.

And sure enough, when I modified my VS2008 shortcut according to these instructions, most (if not all) of my issues seem to have disappeared.

A friend of mine told me about Wishmaster - The Misheard Lyrics on YouTube.  Hilarious!

LINQPad is a tool for learning LINQ, and incidentally for replacing SQL Management Studio.  Playing around with Linq and seeing how much more elegant it is to phrase queries in Linq rather than SQL, I really feel sooo tired of SQL.  I'm missing Linq, and I wish the whole world would upgrade to .NET 3.5 right now.

Shameless plug: Actually, SQL disappeared out of my life almost a year ago, when I started working for Tech Talk.  They have an O/R Mapping product, called Genome.  And Genome even has LINQ Integration.

The ÖBB, Austria's (formerly) federal railroad agency, offers companies (and people I assume) the possibility to endorse a train.  So I could go ahead, endorse a train, and have the seductive female voice in stations announce "ICE 123 Dirk Rombauts with destination Antwerp is arriving at platform 42".

Apparently, Microsoft chose to market Windows Vista in Austria through that channel too.  Just too bad the the ÖBB are advising people not to use Windows Vista after all ("Bitte nicht einsteigen" is German for "Do not board this train"):

I was working on one of my pet projects the other day, and wanted to implement this behavior: I have a text box for entering a time, and I use a masked textbox for that purpose.  The text box has a default value, but the text should be selected so that users can start typing a new time right away - without having to select the existing value first.  My first thought was simple:

That didn't work as expected, however.  The text in the text box was not selected, even though maskedTextBox1.SelectedText returned the entire content of the checkbox.

After some digging around on MSDN, I found a community content entry for TextBoxBase.SelectAll().  It links to a discussion on the Microsoft Windows Forms Forum, that describes my problem and offers a solution:

I think this is a very good example of helpful community content in MSDN!

One of the things that makes me go berserk is a program that minimizes to the notification area of the Taskbar and animates itself all the time for no good reason.  This is incredibly distracting: I keep looking down to it to see what's happening.  Read Peripheral and Foveal Vision for an entry-level read on why this is so.  Thankfully, there's a standard functionality in Windows that helps out.

How To Hide Annoying Icons In The Notification Area

1. Right-Click the Taskbar
2. Select Properties
3. Click on the Notification Area tab
4. Activate the "Hide inactive icons" checkbox if it is not already activated
5. Click on the Customize button.
6. Click on the row containing the offending program
7. Select Hide from the Behavior dropdown
8. Click OK to close the form
9. Click OK again to close the Taskbar Properties window

Thanks to my colleague Marcus for sharing this little secret with me!

Today I was looking for the AcceptButton and CancelButton property on System.Windows.Forms.UserControl.  Guess what?  They don't exist.  A bit of Googling (*) pointed me to this blog entry, which works like a charm: delarou's weblog - AcceptButton and CancelButton on a UserControl

(*) as in "searching using the Google search engine" - before any Google lawyers crack down on me.

A shameless plug for a conference where I will be speaking: DevCamp 07, and specifically Track 3 at 14:00: Ein Tag im Leben eines WPF Quiz Show Entwicklungsteams (yes, the conference is completely in German language).  Together with my colleague Gregor I will show how a developer and designer can work together to develop a kewl-looking quiz show program using Windows Presentation Foundation and Visual Studio 2008.

Update: So what is this DevCamp all about?  DevCamp is the first conference targeted at Developers, Architects and Program Managers that focuses exclusively on the Microsoft .NET Platform.  TechTalk (the company I work for and which I, incidentally, can recommend highly if you're looking for a .NET job (even more shameless plug)) wanted to plug that hole and decided to organize such a conference, together with CSS and Cupido. Microsoft and the Fachhochschule Technikum Wien jumped on the bandwagon as well.  There will be three tracks, more than 20 presentations in all.  I'm looking forward to meet the best .NET people Austria has to offer!

Link to Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog : The 1-2-3's on EBCs

• Architecture, Analysis and Design
• The Domain Tree: a thought-provoking comparison between domain models and the WPF visual tree.
• CSLA .NET 3.0 available for download
• Part III. Grabbing the ScreenShot
• Development tools and tips
• IE Developer Toolbar
• Tools for the artistically challenged
• Datadudes rejoice - Service release is now available
• Team System Web Access (formerly TeamPlain) power tools release is now available!
• IE6 and IE7 VPC Refresh Available
• Windows Presentation Foundation
• “3D Programming for Windows” is in the System!
• Introducing XAML Cruncher 2.0
• ItemSkimmingPanel - a panel that does more than just layout
• XBAP & Trust Levels
• How can I have an independent view when my source is ADO.NET?
• Updated Bag-o-Tricks for January
• WPF Multithreading with BackgroundWorker
• O/R Mapping
• Starting Genome OQL Query Analyzer in the development environment
• LINQ to SQL to Support SQL Server Compact Edition
• LINQ to SQL (Part 6 - Retrieving Data Using Stored Procedures)
• LINQ to SQL (Part 7 - Updating our Database using Stored Procedures)
• Think you know how to write UPDATE statement? Think again.
• Sidebar Development
• .NET Sidebar Gadget Creator 2.0 Release
• ASP.NET Development
• ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Released
• Ajaxed Part II. Server Side AJAX
• The asp:ListView control (Part 1 - Building a Product Listing Page with Clean CSS UI)
• Office Development
• Great News for Outlook Developers
• MOSS and WSS RTM SDKs available now
• MOSS + WSS 3.0 RTM SDK's and workflow starter kits available

A lot has happened in ASP.NET 2.0 when it comes do databinding.  There are the data sources that make it really easy to grab some data from a SQL database.  There is even the ObjectDataSource so Microsoft effectively introduced the middle tier in ASP.NET applications (as a speaker on a conference put it eloquently).  But how do I use custom paging?  If I just go ahead and read all data from the database, then discard all but a few records, well ... I'll be in for an unpleasant surprise the moment somebody grabs a profiler.  There has to be a better way.

And there is ... it's all beautifully written in a tutorial called Efficiently Paging Through Large Amounts of Data on www.asp.net.  There are both C# and VB versions.  There are also lots of other data-related tutorials as well, which I'll be sure to read over time.

Design Science have finally released version 6 of MathType, the "professional version of Equation Editor".  I definitely need to give this a spin when I've got time (yeah right).