Working with WinRT, well, I'm just going to say it... sucks!  I'm past the "who moved my cheese" phase; so that's not why I'm making that statement.  It sucks because it is not completely thought out, requires that you have to jump through hoops that were solved by many other API stacks many years ago, and ...

Why aren't there any decent audio libraries for .NET?  Don't get me wrong, it's nice that the framework supports some audio features in a very simple way if you want to just play something.  However, if you need access to the audio data to manipulate it in whatever way or just want to know the duration, play location, audio ...

Someone sent me an IM asking if I knew of a way to handle the pressing of the close button on a console application.  After a bit of research, I found a way (and some limitations).  This required stepping outside of the Microsoft .NET Framework utilizing P/Invoke.  This allowed me to capture the application close event (which ...

IntroductionAt one point or another, most software developers have written a console application.  It might have been while you were learning how to write software or, even more recently, as a way to create a simple tool that doesn't require the extra effort involved in creating a robust user interface.  At Tech-Ed 2007, I actually ...

I'll be at the Tulsa, OK users group this evening presenting on developing for Windows Vista using Visual Studio 2005... so if you're in the area, be sure to stop by and say "hi".

Caleb has sort of let the cat out of the bag... Introducing My.Vista. There are over 7,000 new API's in Windows Vista.  Some of them are immediately obvious while others are deep beneath the surface.  I rather enjoy digging around in Windows API land, however, many people don't care to do this so this area is usually off limits ...

I need to run it through it's paces, but I now have a VS2005 macro that will, whenever I successfully build a release mode project, package the project folder into a zip file named [ProjectName]_src_v[OutputAssemblyFileVersion].zip.  And it doesn't require anything additional to be installed on the machine.  And it's not ...

A couple of days ago a noticed this article, downloaded the code, thought about it for a bit and realized that although he had a great idea... I had a few problems with the implementation.  I really distaste the idea of "unsafe" code unless there is absolutely no way around using it... and even then I'd probably choose to ...

IntroductionThere are a lot of new features in Windows Vista.  In this installment, we’ll explore the WinSAT (Windows System Assessment Tool) API.  (The Windows Experience Index in the Vista UI is part of WinSAT.) The Vista SDK defines it as: Windows System Assessment Tool (WinSAT) assesses the performance characteristics and ...

Someone asked how to make sure their application has focus and how to protect against it losing focus while running.  There are actually many applications that could require this sort of capability, one of which would be a kiosk.  Many years ago, I used somewhat of a hack to accomplish this task.  It was very simple and worked very ...