Despite the fact that I earn a living with technology, and that even many of my leisure hours are spent in front of a computer, I’m feeling especially consumed by technology lately. By “consumed” I mean more of the “waste or burn away” sense.

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Maybe I’ve just imagined this — created my own straw man to take down — but I’ve sometimes sensed some disparagement of user interface programming. “It’s just UI,” the architect will say. “It’s not like it’s a hard or interesting part of the system.” As I’ve done more and more UI development lately, I’ve had to consider if this is the direction I want my career to go.
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So shortly after crowing about how cheaply I was getting cell phone service, I’ve sailed headlong into the rocks of an $80 a month smart phone plan. In spite of all the Android buzz of late, I went with the Palm Pre.

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I frequently say, only half-jokingly, that printers are evil. Actually I love my HP LaserJet 1320, but my Canon Pixma 620 is just plain E-V-I-L.

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When is white not white? When one is Color.White and the other is Color.FromArgb(0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff).

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Antivirus System Pro is an irksome piece of malware that holds your computer hostage until you pay a ransom. It is nothing short of extortion. I just spent a few evenings removing it from a friend’s computer, and the dozens of articles on the web (and even YouTube videos) were all wrong about how to get rid of this instance.
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Easy control transparency isn’t exactly a hallmark of Windows Forms. If you have a form with a background image or a gradient, the stock controls paint with a solid background to give a criminally egregious aesthetic.

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There are lots of examples that demonstrate how to draw a rectangle with rounded corners using GDI+ in .NET. Converting such a rectangle to a Region so that it can be filled or be used for the geometry of a window can have less than perfect results, though.
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If you say “segue” while attempting one, you’ve already blown it.

The official Silverlight documentation about localization gives lots of information about working with resource files, but it is kind of scant on how to actually get localized strings to show up in the UI in a reasonable way. For example, an unreasonable way would be to set the text/content properties of all the controls in a page’s code-behind file. A reasonable way is to use data binding.

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