Raymond Chen just finished a short series on LockWindowUpdate, including when to use it and when not to. I enjoy reading Raymond’s blog for a number of reasons. His posts are short, to the point, and well written, and he discusses topics that I, as a .NET developer who is younger (read: showed up after [...]

I’ve been running Vista on my primary work machine since Day One (much to the chagrin of some of my co-workers). And since Day One I’ve been unable to add any network printers. I know I should be able to add them, other Vista users can add them (although I’m running Ultimate and they’re running [...]

The most useful .NET tool ever created. Ever. For all time. Scott Hanselman has a great rundown of it.

In my last post I mentioned that I use the title of a console window to help track what codebase/component I’m working with. Another way we organize some of these windows is via the window icon (we happen to have color names for our various codebases, so it works pretty well). Today my co-worker Scott [...]

There’s no “title” command in Powershell to set the window title of the console window. I use this frequently because I often have several build/codebase windows open, and switch between them frequently. Add this to your profile to create a “title” alias: 1: function Set-WindowTitle($text) 2: { 3: $Host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle = $text 4: } 5: Set-Alias [...]

Okay, I just ragged on an electronic Sudoku user interface, so now I equally want to commend an application for a user interface job well done in a small (but in my opinion significant) way. The application? Skype. Let me start by saying that I really agree with Jeff Atwood’s assessment of icons, toolbars, etc. [...]

I was looking at an electronic Sudoku game my wife got for Christmas this year, and it struck me just how awful the user interface is. And if you think the interface is bad, you should try actually using it! I think there’s some not-subtle lessons I can learn from this as a software developer. [...]

Jeffrey Snover posted a while ago encouraging others to share their PowerShell automation, no matter how little. Well in the spirit of that post, here is a script that will reboot a Polycom IP phone; I tested it with the IP600. (Note: my script is based on the perl version found here.) Essentially the script [...]