Flyover Country

Let’s say you have a shareware application that can do exciting things like self-registration and updating on the fly. Back in the Windows XP days, supporting scenarios like these would be a cakewalk; you could simply write a serial number to HKLM, or run an MSI downloaded off the Internet. Too bad if a user didn’t [...]

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“The frozen goober of ballpoint thing”
- Helen describing the obstruction at the end of a ballpoint pen that she was trying to remove by huffing hot air into the pen.

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I’ll admit it: I made a rookie mistake when I migrated this weblog over to WordPress. I had been neglecting my blog for over a month, but even so, FeedBurner reported that I had more subscribers to my blog than ever before. I spent the better part of a day this past weekend moving all [...]

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Jeremy Jarrell raises some excellent points on his blog about the pain and suffering he goes through when trying to use Visual Studio for lightweight code editing and experimentation:
[F]or just playing with scratch code while lying in bed at night, working on my open source projects, or just plain having fun…Visual Studio seems like overkill. [...]

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Over the past few blog posts, we’ve looked into what Virtualization and run levels are all about, and learned how to create a Fusion manifest that is appropriate for inclusion on Windows Vista. When we created that Fusion manifest for Windows Vista, we never solved the problem of how to include it in your application. I [...]

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I finally dumped MovableType. We had a long, sordid relationship that started all the way back in 2003. I used to think that I really liked it, and even loved it at one point. We broke up under less than optimal circumstances, and I thought that I’d put it all behind me. Then, last year [...]

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Last time, we took a dive into what virtualization on Windows Vista is all about, and examined the different run levels available to your application. Like I mentioned before, unless you know for a fact that your app should run with higher privileges, you should always make your application run under asInvoker.
Today, we’re [...]

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Charles Petzold, tha doggfather of Windows programming, published a few choice words about how Macs “just worked” back in December:
On Apple’s home page, the most important information they deemed necessary to convey to me was that I needed QuickTime 7 to view even more of those insufferable TV ads where that smug goateed glazy-eyed dork [...]

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You’ve probably heard a lot about User Account Control (UAC) on Windows Vista already. Contrary to popular perception, it’s really not that bad, as long as the developers creating the software you use do the right thing by not trying to write or access stuff where they shouldn’t. Ensuring that your software correctly supports UAC [...]

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I’ve been laying low for the past month, and my posting was sporadic even before that. Part of the reason for that was the Christmas-New Years blogging deadzone. But the bulk of the reason was I changed jobs. It’s pretty common for Microsofties to switch jobs. I’ve heard numbers saying that most people move around [...]

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