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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Being relatively new to Silverlight development, I’ve not had the good sense to accept conventional wisdom that the Visual Studio unit test framework can’t be used to test Silverlight code. For testing view models at least, I’ve been successfully using Mstest and Rhino Mocks for a few months now.

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I’m a man of few words. Well, vocally anyway. My wife has teased that I must have a fixed daily allotment of spoken words, and on evenings when I’m particularly quiet, I must have used them up already. I’m not sure if she buys the “still waters run deep” explanation, but not being much of a talker comes in handy for getting cheap cell phone service.

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For those of us poor folk who didn’t make it to PDC this past fall, Microsoft has been taking the show to us in the form of its MSDN Unleashed series. Rob Bagby, developer evangelist, came to Salt Lake City to present and give updates about new and upcoming technologies for developers.

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