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My colleague Sergey just showed me a useful tool for getting CPU information on your Windows hardware system called CPU-Z.

I recently had the need/desire to dynamically generate some code in .NET.  It's not something you tend to do a lot unless you are creating a compiler, so it was an interesting experience.  In the end it didn't solve my problem, but it was educational none-the-less. First I'll describe the scenario of the problem I was trying to solve ...

While I'm waiting for some files to copy around I thought I'd record my recent PowerShell learnin'. Somtimes a command, like Get-ChildItem can return either an array of results or just a single one.  You can use the @ symbol to cast the result into an array, so:(gci -i *.txt).Count Sometimes returns nothing, whereas:@(gci -i ...

  Starting to get the hang of PowerShell.  Today I wanted to quickly count the number of lines in some source code.   There's a simple implementation and then there's a better one.  In the end I settled on:$count=0;gci . -i *.cs,*.cpp,*.h -r | %{$count += [System.IO.File]::ReadAllLines($_.FullName).Count};$count Which is ...

Still struggling to gain traction with PowerShell.  I've stopped myself running the CMD prompt by default, and I've installed it on all my test VPC machines. Firstly, I recommend you download the Windows PowerShell Graphical Help File.  It's an old school .chm file, but you can search it.  Don't underestimate how useful this is ...

My friend Scott asked me the other day how he might go about changing the desktop wallpaper programmatically.  It's one of those things that is still buried in the native Windows Win32 API.  The call you need is SystemParametersInfo and the action you need is SPI_SETDESKWALLPAPER. Scott pointed out that this only takes a bitmap.  ...

If you found this entry, you are either a Dvorak keyboard typist searching for help or you are a strange individual who reads my blog but never leaves a comment. If you are the former then the link you are looking for is to this Microsoft Help & Support Article stupidly entitled Unable to Log On after Changing Keyboard Layout which ...

I've held off moving to Windows PowerShell.  The reason is that I came up with a solution for running C# source directly from the command line as script a few years ago using CodeRunner .NET, and I've haven't had a pressing need for more functionality.  But I decided that the time has come to say goodbye to the ...

Every so often I need get a crash dump for a crashing native process, and I always forget where to find the tools.  The easiest to use is ADPlus which is part of the Debugging Tools for Windows.  The best write-up I've found on other alternatives and how to take crash dumps is from the ASKPERF blog.

I have to say that Internet Explorer 7 still hasn't reached the level of functionality provided by Maxthon, but it's really close.  So close in fact that I only use IE these days.  The IE7Pro Add-in provides a few more cool features that are missing.