I just noticed that Visual Studio 2010 has duplicated the mouse wheel zooming feature used by Windows Explorer and Word 2007. Simply hold down the Ctrl key and scroll the mouse wheel to zoom the text editor in and out. This is great for presentations. No more digging through the Visual Studio Options...

Continuing the discussion of Excel RTD servers, here is about the simplest RTD server I could come up with. I used C# for this example to allow us to focus on semantics. Next time I’ll show a minimal C++ implementation. [ Guid("9AA100A8-E50E-4047-9C60-E4732391063E"), ProgId("Kerr.Sample.RtdServer"),...

So it turns out that there are in fact quite a few developers who care about writing RTD servers. I’ve received a few emails asking for more information so I may post a few more entries on the subject. Last time I simply showed what the RTD server interfaces look like in C++ . Here’s the equivalent in...

Excel provides a function called RTD (real-time data) that lets you specify a COM server via its ProgId so that you can push data into Excel. Recently I had to implement an RTD server for a client and was frustrated at how hard it was to find the COM interface definitions to implement. It doesn’t appear...

Now that the Windows 7 keynote is over we can finally start exploring some of the improvements. This is going to be a truly awesome upgrade. As Paul puts it , Windows 7 is Windows Vista done right. If you’re not sure where to start then I’d suggest starting right at the bottom. Listen to Mark Russinovich...

The MSDN Library is one of those things I install locally right after installing Visual Studio . It’s an invaluable resource to have at your fingertips. There are however occasions when I don’t have it installed or I’m using the web for some extra search power. Inevitably I end up with something like...

Installing Visual Studio for .NET development is pretty easy: Install Visual Studio and the latest service pack. You’re done. Installing Visual Studio for C++ development is fraught with problems (ok that’s perhaps a bit dramatic). In most cases you not only need Visual Studio and its service pack, but...

Raymond Chen published an article earlier this week about ShellExecute hooks and it reminded me of a shell hook of sorts that still exists in Windows Vista despite Raymond’s very good argument that shell hooks are often used for evil and certainly can’t be used to add security. Granted this hook is not...

We released the first version of the Notches Toolbar today . From the start, we’ve always felt that reviews need to be delivered contextually and thus have emphasized partnerships over simply aggregating reviews. At the same time, we recognize that partnerships are not always possible for a variety of...

Microsoft recently published a document entitled Windows Vista Performance and Tuning . It collects much of the “common knowledge” about optimizing the performance of Windows Vista into a single document. This is a great reference if you’re not that familiar with Vista and want some ideas on how to improve...