Just a few quick .NET samples for performing some common tasks that the .NET Framework doesn’t do for you:

[)amien[)amien

Some people just love shipping applications with the stupidest possible default settings.

Internet Explorer 7.0 seems to be just one such application.

Taking a computer science honours degree in your spare time is a massive commitment and one that I’m not sure I would have embarked upon had I appreciated just how long the road would be when I started back in 1998.

It has taken me 9 courses, 7 years, 46 assignments, 8 exams and 1 final project (a mini-eBay).

I’m proud to announce that I’ve joined the AnkhSVN team, albeit in a rather minor capacity.

For the last few weeks I’ve been working on a set of new icons to add a bit of sparkle to the user interface for the forthcoming AnkhSVN 1.0 release. There is a good chance they will make the next release candidate that’s on it’s way to address some issues with delete/remove functionality.

Like most people I’ve run into my fair share of oddities and problems in Visual Studio 2005 including the dreaded VB compiler dying a death on reasonable-sized projects so I jumped at the chance to get my hands on the beta of SP1.

There are several versions of the service pack including one for Visual Studio 2005, one for each of the Express editions and one for the Team Foundation Server. My experiences here are with the 350MB SP1 beta for Visual Studio 2005.

The Visual Studio IDE (VS2003, VS2005) is a massive beast with a plethora of options, settings and tweaks to be had.

A few of my favorite, often overlooked ones, are:

Many years ago I came across, by accident, a way of entering foreign accented characters into Microsoft Office applications by way of a standard non-accented UK/US keyboard.

Whilst this technique is documented in a few places very few people seem to have come across it.

I wrote a while back about how Rojo’s upgrade was a disaster and that it had led me to look for alternatives.

Bloglines didn’t have the same feeling of a polished interface that Rojo has tempted me with but unlike Rojo but it has been happily consuming the feeds of all my sites and presenting them without fuss or issue since I started using it a few weeks ago.

Whether it’s a meeting for a specific time or remembering to stop the tea brewing in 7 minutes time (lovely tea from Adagio Teas that deserves it’s own blog post) events often whiz by without me noticing. I’m not great at time based background threading… but a computer is.

Sure I fire up Outlook (which I don’t use any more), iCal (Only open when I need it) or Google Calendar, create a new event, choose the type, choose which day and time it occurs at and mentally do the math in my head for 7 minutes from now taking the seconds into consideration…. but that’s distracting enough I think “No, I’ll just remember” and I don’t.

There are a few great apps in there and all come with source — the ones I checked out were in C# :)

Some of my favorites are: