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February 2004 - Posts

Tuesday, February 24, 2004 1:51 AM

Desaware (Spyworks et al) now with full Source!!!!

Desaware has just announced that they are, in addition to bundling their products into two separate suites (.NET and COM versions), including FULL SOURCE CODE !!!!! This is incredible news. Considered to be one of the companies that pulls off the impossible
Posted by CorySmith | 9 Comments
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Tuesday, February 24, 2004 1:04 AM

XBOX Friends v0.0.0.9 and XBOX Live 3.0 MSN Alerts and Messenger Integration

New version of my XBOX Friends has been posted . If you were having problems getting this to run on your machine in the past, please refer to the installation notes on the download page for further instructions. I've also started a changed log on the
Posted by CorySmith | 8 Comments
Monday, February 23, 2004 5:14 PM

Blog Censorship!!!!!

I've recently been a victim of blog censorship. Nothing I said was derogatory in any manner, unless you count me saying “WAAAAAAAAAH! Get over it!” as derogatory ;-). The issue is that I seriously disagreed with the individual and stated that what he
Posted by CorySmith | 16 Comments
Monday, February 23, 2004 1:11 AM

CodeSmith 2.5 Officially Released

One of my fellow coders from days of yesteryear has released a new version of his excellent product, CodeSmith . It now includes an IDE (if you get the professional release). If you haven't checked out CodeSmith, nows the time to do so. (If you have looked
Posted by CorySmith | 0 Comments
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Friday, February 20, 2004 6:23 PM

.NET XBOX Live Night (Every Saturday) Reminder

Just a quick reminder that tomorrow night is .NET XBOX Live Night that James Avery introduced upon the world! So far, it's been Project Gotham Racing 2, but some interest is building for Rainbow Six 3. We will probably kick off the game with PGR2 and
Posted by CorySmith | 3 Comments
Thursday, February 19, 2004 2:03 AM

XBOX Live Friends Thingee (.NET Connected approvable - is that a word?)

Well, we are now up to v0.0.0.5... and it's now using web services. OK, don't get your hopes up, it's not from XBOX; but rather one via this website. Basically, one of the thoughts I had while using personally using the friends thingee is that how do
Posted by CorySmith | 2 Comments
Wednesday, February 18, 2004 5:07 AM

XBOX Friends List (Test Bed O' Fun)

Well, this is sort of turning into a project that gives me an opportunity to play with some technologies that I've either read about or seen and just haven't had a reason to use them. Tonight, I created a web-service to use in tangent with the application.
Posted by CorySmith | 1 Comments
Tuesday, February 17, 2004 2:09 AM

XBOX Friends List (Pre-Release Version)

I'm making a pre-release version of the XBOX Friends List Watcher desktop application available for download. You can have the list auto refresh periodically by selecting the Auto Refresh menu item and selected an interval. F5 will refresh as well. If
Posted by CorySmith | 13 Comments
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Monday, February 16, 2004 2:16 AM

XBOX Live Friends List Watcher (Windows Forms)

A few of us on XBOX Live were discussing how nice it would be to have an application that you could have on your desktop that would notify you when one of your friends was online playing a game. We kicked around a few ideas and we ran into several problems
Posted by CorySmith | 10 Comments
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Sunday, February 15, 2004 4:54 PM

[How To] Check to see if Visual Styles are enabled

After my rant and a some other people picking it up on their blog , I got a response from Raghavendra Prabhu who is part of the .NET Client Team letting us know that VisualStyles in Whidbey has a ton of improvements and resolves the issues I point out
Posted by CorySmith | 6 Comments
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Saturday, February 14, 2004 8:37 PM

Revenge Of DriveInfo (Drive Serial Numbers)

Although WMI allows you to gain access to a lot of interesting information, it's obnoxiously slow. Also, the previous example would only get me the serial numbers for my first two hard drives. It was now showing the serial number for my third hard drive
Posted by CorySmith | 11 Comments
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Saturday, February 14, 2004 2:15 PM

Not something you see every day (in Fort Worth/Dallas)

Normally, when when the winters here get cold enough for rain to become something other than rain, we have sleet or freezing rain. What a surprise to wake up this morning and have this: Snow. Real snow. It can actually be measured in inches (between 3-6
Posted by CorySmith | 4 Comments
Saturday, February 14, 2004 2:25 AM

Determine Hard Drive Serial Numbers

Thanks to James Avery for pointing out an article on CodeProject on how to determine drive serial numbers using WMI in C#. Ported it to VB.NET and VB.NET'ised it a bit. Download [update] Also, be sure to check out The Revenge of DriveInfo .
Posted by CorySmith | 32 Comments
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Saturday, February 14, 2004 2:00 AM

Creating a Reusable Error Dialog for .NET Applications (VB.NET)

Sijin Joseph pointed out a pretty nice example of a reusable error dialog that Jason Bock put together. It's written in C#, so you know it was just screaming to be ported to VB.NET ;-) Of course, I can't just leave well enough alone. I modified the example
Posted by CorySmith | 3 Comments
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Saturday, February 14, 2004 1:26 AM

Windows XP Visual Styles (Themes) [How To / RANT]

Everyone who knows me will usually accuses me as being part of the 'collective'. They would have you believe that I think Microsoft can do no wrong. Well, here's my first official rant about how Microsoft can do something very, very, very wrong. OK, great,
Posted by CorySmith | 11 Comments
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Wednesday, February 11, 2004 10:43 PM

Microsoft DevDays 2004 - March 8th - Dallas, TX

If your going to be in Dallas and attending DevDays, be sure to let me know; maybe we get together after the event for a few drinks considering the event ends at 5:00pm. I'm not thrilled at the prospect of hitting rush hour; so I'll definately have some
Posted by CorySmith | 3 Comments
Monday, February 09, 2004 8:57 PM

My computer blew up in my face... literally!

OK, so it was technically the power supply... but still, was downright impressive. Flames literally shot out of the fan during turning the machine on. To make matters worse, it happened while my face was next to the fan so I could hear if it was spinning.
Posted by CorySmith | 15 Comments
Sunday, February 08, 2004 4:29 PM

XBOX Live Night - Saturdays at 7pm (central)

It's psuedo official... Saturday nights at 7pm (central time) is XBOX Live Night. Last night was a lot of fun with the bloggers that showed up. We had James Avery , Erik Porter , Philip Rieck , Drew Robbins and myself playing Project Gotham Racing 2.
Posted by CorySmith | 2 Comments
Saturday, February 07, 2004 9:40 PM

MS Research TreeMap.Net

Paschal L points out the Microsoft Research's TreeMap.Net . It's an interested way to view information. I saw it a while back as a map showing the newsgroup traffic. However, I didn't even think of using this model to view your drive usage . Now that's
Posted by CorySmith | 11 Comments
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Saturday, February 07, 2004 9:17 PM

Coding 4 Fun Drum Machine (in VB.NET)

The Coding 4 Fun - Building a Drum Machine with DirectSound article that Duncan Mackenzie brought to my attention looked pretty interesting, however, it doesn't have a VB.NET version. Although the C# version runs well enough and you can use it as a resource
Posted by CorySmith | 4 Comments
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Saturday, February 07, 2004 5:54 PM

Copyrights and Sample Usage [RANT]

Why is it that you see the following notice in a lot of samples? // THIS CODE AND INFORMATION IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY // KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE // IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND/OR
Posted by CorySmith | 1 Comments
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Friday, February 06, 2004 7:29 PM

Windows XP NTFS file/share permissions...

Probably the highest item on my pet peeve list for Windows XP is the fact that if you are not running as part of a domain, instead using workgroups, you are unable to modify the directory permissions that NTFS allows you to have. You are stuck with the
Posted by CorySmith | 25 Comments
Wednesday, February 04, 2004 3:59 AM

Paul Vick explains what 'enable optimizations' actually does...

Paul Vick noticed my question about what exactly does the enable optimizations option in VB.NET does. In addition, he explains why turning this option on actually makes it difficult to debug the application, since some of the opcodes are removed since
Posted by CorySmith | 1 Comments
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Wednesday, February 04, 2004 3:35 AM

Structured Error Handling... My oppinion on the subject.

I've seen a couple of posts concerning the evils that VB.NET has concerning the following: Try Catch ex As Exception End Try Kirk Allen Evans points out how VB.NET's autocomplete is Propagating Improper SEH . Charles Torre points out how this can “very
Posted by CorySmith | 5 Comments
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Wednesday, February 04, 2004 2:28 AM

Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004

I've joined a couple of other folks in the attempt to rebuild their machines with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004. I was resisting the move, but since Office 2003 has been released it gave me two reasons to rebuild my machine. To add even more incentive,
Posted by CorySmith | 35 Comments
Wednesday, February 04, 2004 2:08 AM

The Flu.... SUCKS!

Well, after nearly three weeks... I'm beginning to recover from the flu. So obviously I haven't been getting nearly enough done here on AddressOf and my emails have stacked up pretty high. Going to take me a little while to catch up, so just a quick note
Posted by CorySmith | 0 Comments