This site has some good tutorials for Paint Shop to enable you to create decent graphics when you aren't really a graphics person. (i.e., me).

I came across an excellent run down of the limitation of System.Gadget.Settings for those who are writing gadgets for Windows Vista. Instead of recapping the article, I will simply point to it here. The author provides a settings management class to replace the one that is used by default, allowing one to get around the maximum string length for a setting of 2048. I plan on using this class in the development of my gadgets to store JSON for settings to make the code more concise and straight forward.

Source from: RaspenJho

Imports System

Imports EnvDTE

Imports System.Diagnostics

Public Module Collapse Sub CollapseAll()

' Get the the Solution Explorer tree

Dim UIHSolutionExplorer As UIHierarchy

UIHSolutionExplorer = DTE.Windows.Item(Constants.vsext_wk_SProjectWindow).Object()

' Check if there is any open solution

If (UIHSolutionExplorer.UIHierarchyItems.Count = 0) Then

' MsgBox("Nothing to collapse. You must have an open solution.")

Return

End If

' Get the top node (the name of the solution)

Dim UIHSolutionRootNode As UIHierarchyItem

UIHSolutionRootNode = UIHSolutionExplorer.UIHierarchyItems.Item(1)

UIHSolutionRootNode.DTE.SuppressUI = True

' Collapse each project node

Dim UIHItem As UIHierarchyItem For Each UIHItem In UIHSolutionRootNode.UIHierarchyItems

'UIHItem.UIHierarchyItems.Expanded = False

If UIHItem.UIHierarchyItems.Expanded Then

Collapse(UIHItem)

End If

Next

' Select the solution node, or else when you click

' on the solution window

' scrollbar, it will synchronize the open document

' with the tree and pop

' out the corresponding node which is probably not what you want.

UIHSolutionRootNode.Select(vsUISelectionType.vsUISelectionTypeSelect)

UIHSolutionRootNode.DTE.SuppressUI = False

End Sub

Private Sub Collapse(ByVal item As UIHierarchyItem) For Each eitem As UIHierarchyItem In item.UIHierarchyItems

If eitem.UIHierarchyItems.Expanded AndAlso eitem.UIHierarchyItems.Count > 0 Then

Collapse(eitem)

End If

Next

item.UIHierarchyItems.Expanded = False

End Sub

End Module

I have not had a chance to check all of these out, but they sound interesting:

Footnote - Has deal with National Archives where you can view almost anything in the archives

Hard to Find 800 Numbers - Just what it says

Wink - People search engine that references popular social networking sites. Sounds a lot like SPOCK

Lumosity - Play games that have been lab tested to improve memory, attention, processing speed and cognitive control

Top Secret Recipes - Recipe clones from various famous chains and products

The World's Healthiest Foods - Information on how foods affect your health

I Can Has Cheezburger - Cat pictures

BullPoo - Online community for investors

Indeed - Job website

Trulia - Real estate website

The Bargainist - Scours web for best bargains, coupons and free offers

Do My Stuff - Contract out small jobs and chores

Roadside America - Quirky touristy activities in various areas

Wikitravel - Travel research site

Yapta - Track ticket prices for airlines so that you can attempt to get a refund if you purchased high

DZone - Developer website

ProgrammableWeb - Keeps tabs on mashups and open APIs across the Web

Website Grader - Sumbit a url to be graded and obtain suggestions on improvement

Everything USB - Gadget blog for USB tools

AppScout - Place to find software, tips and tricks

MakeUseOf - Quick summaries of available web applications and how you might be able to use them

Nolo - Get legal documents, advice and information

Gawker - Track celebrity news

 

After moving my projects to a share on the server so that they could be automatically backed up (I have installed source control yet as Team Foundation Server is giving me fits about all sorts of stuff. That is one of the pickiest installs I have ever seen!), I started receiving the following error when I tried to compile my website: "Request for the permission of type 'System.Web.AspNetHostingPermission, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' failed." I did a little searching and found that I could add full trust for the share at the machine level to solve the issue. The command was: CasPol.exe -q -m -ag 1.2 -url file://s:\Mark\* FullTrust -n s:\Mark -d "FullTrust granted to: s:\Mark".

A link to an MSDN blog with some more details is here

I ran across an issue today that Vista made a bit difficult to get around. It appears that Microsoft removed the option to turn on/off the "Browse in same window" option in Vista for file type associations. In prior versions, to make Internet Explorer show a word or excel document in the browswer instead of opening a new window, one could simply go to Tools..Folder Options, click on the File Types tab, find the file type you wanted to alter and click the Advanced Tab. There was then a check box to allow browsing in the same window or to force office to open the document outside of the browser.

In Vista, file types are altered via Default Programs in the Control Panel, option titled "Associate a file type or protocol with a program". Unfortunately, the advanced options available in prior versions of windows are no longer there. To get around this, the only way I have found thus far is to use regedit and make the following changes for Excel:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Excel.Sheet.8]
"BrowserFlags"=0

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Excel.Sheet.12]
"BrowserFlags"=0

To force new windows instead of keeping it in the same window, use 8 instead of 0.

Microsoft has a knowledge base article on this that details the keys for other Office documents as well at:

www.mssoftwareconsulting.com/general/Refer.aspx?url=http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;162059

I recently ran into some issues when attempting to run ODBC on a 64-bit machine. The particular ODBC driver I was using installed as a 32-bit driver, and thus had to be accessed through SysWow64\odbcad32.exe. After setting up the data source and running my application, I recieved the error "Data source name not found and no default driver specified" even though it was clearly setup. After doing some digging I found that the application was compiled with the 'Any CPU' option. I am not entirely clear here, but it appears that when the application runs on a 64-bit machine it will run as a 64-bit application and only look at the 64-bit data sources on the machine. If I compile the application with a platform target of x86, and run it on the 64-bit machine it runs and looks at the 32-bit data sources. Problem solved.