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Sometimes programming in .NET just drives me up a wall. Not that I would prefer to go back to the Win32 API and writing my own message loops, but when a framework is as all-encompassing and opaque as .NET is, it’s doubly important to make the internals work right and sensibly, and doubly likely that [...]

Despite the fact that there is every possibility I am uniquely imperceptive, I thought I would throw this out there on the off chance that there is at least one other person who was stumbling around in the Vista user interface looking for a way to adjust channel levels in a 5.1 or 7.1 channel [...]

If you’re using the System.IO.File.Exists method to determine whether a file is present in a particular location, then the answer to the question posed in the title of this post might be: when you don’t have permissions to see it. This might seem obvious, but actually it caught me a little bit off guard this [...]

It was with some degree of sadness that I closed the cover of Patrick O’Brian’s “Blue at the Mizzen” last evening. The act marked the end of my second trip through the twenty-volume series since I first had “Master and Commander” recommended to me by my brother ten years ago or more. I enjoyed this journey every [...]

I like it when, every now and then, some ridiculously low-tech requirement comes along and I can spend a few minutes whipping up a class to make it easier and more flexible. Such things often go into the utility library and see a lot of reuse. An opportunity arose recently when I was working on [...]

TextTable is a C# class that makes it easy to define tabular data formats and render them in fixed-width text. It started out as the answer to an email reporting requirement, and evolved into something fairly flexible. Here’s a screenshot of the output from the example program included in the archive, in which several TextTables [...]

A couple of events over the last week have me thinking about the concept of aliasing. I first encountered this idea when I started messing with computer graphics back in the late 80′s, and indeed the first event to which I refer involved someone on a forum bringing up the use of “antialiasing” techniques in [...]

GMemory is a Google-based image search and match game that takes its inspiration from the game of Memory that I used to play with my kids when they were young. The Memory game consists of a number of wooden tiles with images on one side. Each distinct image appears twice in the tile set. The [...]

The SilverDraw library is an update to my ColorTools and GradientEditor projects. It primarily contains the color pickers and gradient editors from those two assemblies, and provides a place for me to hang other classes as I develop them. I produced this in response to a request for access to the GradientEditor application, which I [...]

GSearch is a set of class libraries for searching Google from .NET 3.5 and Silverlight 2 managed code. GSearch uses the Google RESTful webservice API to execute searches and receive results, and supports the following search types: blogs, books, images, locations, news, patents, video, and web. GSearch consists of a core assembly, GSearch.Core.dll, that is [...]