I recently decided to create a new image viewer for Windows. I’m not a fan of the default Windows Photo Viewer and think most third party image viewers are even worse. The only one I’ve liked quite a bit is the viewer that comes bundled with Google’s Picasa. However, Picasa itself no longer really fits into my digital photo organization strategy and I really hate to install all of Picasa just so I can have the peripheral 5% that constitutes its image viewer. So I decided to roll my own using WPF…...

Without getting into all the whys and wtfs, the other day I had a need to dynamically render and inject html snippets into various webpages at runtime. The project I’m working on originally created the html in C# by concatenating string fragments and formatting them with runtime values. With all the requisite escape sequences needed to create valid html (including encapsulated JavaScript), this approach struck me as a bit messy and I decided to take a different route....

When I first started coding, I bought several 1,000+ page tomes that must have weighed eight pounds each. Books with that much mass do not suit my preferred reading style: leaning back, in my easy chair. They were equally inconvenient when I wanted to work though an example on my computer. Impossible to hold with one hand, I had to lie them down flat on my desk and either hover my head nearly directly above or use both hands to lift it up in order to refer back to the text....

Recently I’ve found myself looking up IIS process ids juuuuuuust infrequently enough that I haven’t been able to memorize either the command itself or the file location for appcmd.exe, meaning I’ve been looking them up every time I’ve needed them. That, I decided, was too much work, so I actually wrote The Simplest Console App Everk to spit out the information for me. Memorization, schmemorization. Yep, because I’m just that lazy....

For years, I was a total treadmill whore. I would run upwards of seven miles at a stretch, three times a week - at the gym, on a treadmill. It made sense. I was already in the gym up to five days a week lifting weights and/or swimming; why wouldn’t I run while I was there too? I endured a fair amount of ribbing for my lengthy treadmill trysts, especially from ‘real’ runners....

In my experience, at least, most recruiters won’t go out of their way to call you at work so long as they can easily find another number to reach you. The real conundrum is figuring out what number should you make readily available....

Every day I scour articles on tech blogs, searching for the latest tidbit on emerging technologies that I can’t wait to go mainstream...

Getting the custom number format string for an Excel cell using OpenXml is not entirely intuitive. But once you understand how this information is laid out, it starts making sense....