Showing archive results for 2010

This year, it's advanced debugging.

A customer asked for advice on how to accomplish something, the details of which are not important, except to say that what they were trying to do was far more complicated than the twenty-word summary would suggest. And I wasn't convinced that it was a good idea, sort of like asking for advice on how to catch a baseball in your teeth or pick all t...

In another installment of I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature, I offer you this customer: My customer has created a Windows Vista sidebar gadget and wants to know if there's a way to force this gadget to appear at the top of the sidebar and prevent the user from moving or removing it. I applaud this company for having writte...

The topic backlog from Suggestion Box 3 has nearly cleared out, and I've actually been enjoying not having to write up a reply every Monday for the past several months, but all good things must come to an end, and so, without much fanfare, we now have Suggestion Box 4. Remember, the suggestion box is for suggestions for future topics. I...

A colleague of mine visited an internal Web site for task ABC and found that the site was no longer there. Instead it was replaced with a simple message: Designed with the user in mind you will now find contextual ABC and DEF information served up in a secure format alongside all GHI information. Access to relevant multi-perspective content...

Commenter Chris 'Xenon' Hanson points out that fiddling with the style directly via leads to strange behavior. However it isn't the case that "most widget classes work fine." Reaching in and fiddling the style bit directly is like reaching into a program's internal variables and just changing the values: All the other work that is associated wi...

A customer wanted to know how to launch Explorer's Search window with specific fixed search criteria. It turns out that there are two ways of doing this, the poor man's way and the overachiever's way. The overachiever's way is actually easier to discover. You can use the search-ms protocol to generate a command string that describes the query you...

One of my colleagues had a problem with content management. I've changed the underlying scenario but the principle is the same. Is there a way to require that someone other than the author of a proposal sign off before the proposal tracking system accepts it? We had an issue where somebody wrote up a proposal, and due to a miscommunication, the pr...

One of the features added to the Explorer Address Bar in Windows Vista is the ability to navigate quickly to an item by clicking on its name, or navigate to a folder's children by clicking the arrow that appears next to the item and selecting your destination. One customer reported that there appeared to be a problem with the Control Panel: Switc...

Not saying how I know.