Lately I had to sign up to a site to get access to the answers to questions posted on their forum. How did I know that the site had answers? Well, Google showed me the question and part of the answer when I searched for the exact error message for a problem I was having, but when I followed the link from Google to the site I found I couldn't view the answer unless I became a (free) member.   I retreated back to Google to find to my dismay that there's no cached copy of the page I want. So, I...

This is a good utilisation of an existing technology e.g. airport locations, free weather availability and RSS (via Alex Barnett). This link lists countries outside the US and Canada that the service supports, and Melbourne weather is here (using ICAO code YMML). This is handy to be able to tell the wife when it's OK to hang washing on the line, or to know if I need my umbrella to walk out to the car. I don't know if I've got a use for visibility, windspeed, and barometer readings just yet, but it is handy to have this kind of news delivered to...

With Windows XP Service Pack 2 released, it would be handy to determine if you have it installed programatically (using C# or VB.NET). Saar Carmi points me in the right direction to KB 304721. Related is KB 304283 which explains how to find out Windows versions in C# using the System.Environment.OSVersion structure (I don't know if it detects SP2, as I don't have SP2 yet...at least now I'm able to check!)

Only a geek could laugh at some of the jokes Devankur Thakur has collected. I also found out my brother likes Dilbert, I thought I was the only one in my family!

As mentioned before, I pretty much work in a one-developer shop. This is not an excuse! When I started a fairly sizable project last year, I tried to start off right and set up CVS for source control, learned how to use NAnt to build my solution, did some playing with NUnit for tests and also set up NDoc to do my documentation. A year and a half later I look back with regret that I ditched all of these in favor of...nothing. I was worried about the maintenance around my whole “build regime“ and it seemed like all my effort was...

Michael Weinhardt's excellent article IUIs and Web-Style Navigation in Windows Forms, Part 1 describes how to create an “inductive” (I consider it to be like a task-based) user interface, like the Windows XP "Workgroup-Mode User Account Management" or the Office 2003 Research Pane. I can't do a very good job explaining inductive versus deductive user interfaces; there's an old article at MSDN that gives the complete run-down. The other day and had a play around with the download which is in C#. Michael has created a neat little way to get a wizard-like interface (that's also capable of much more) and Windows Forms...