Interestingly enough I searched through the Windows Media Player settings for ages after I enabled it for the setting to disable the “mini-mode” where WMP sits in your taskbar.

Then I stumbled across this post.  No biggie, I would have eventually found it anyway.  Well, at least I’ll keep telling myself that.

Basically, right click your taskbar and choose Toolbars > Windows Media Player.

I list this as a “hot tip” because it makes no sense to put options for another application in another application.  Got all that?

Another Stack Overflow gem in “How to use Office from Visual Studio C#?“  The question was exhausting but one of those who responded had some sagely advice:

The answer is to “Copy Local” whatever assembly dll you get for the interop. Once you have the assembly dll in your output folder, add a reference to it, and check it into source control.

Now everyone has the referenced assembly dll.

—anonymousstackoverflow

Now I’m sure to some that may sound like kindergarten learning but it never dawned on me to put external dependencies under source control.

In this fashion a set of legacy developers can maintain legacy code while emerging standards developers can maintain the latest emergent standard — both separated from the other one’s development.

I’ve had a light bulb and it’s warm.

Clean Visual Studio Workspace is handy for a couple reasons for me, the first of which is understanding what can and cannot be cleaned.

Here’s a related utility.

And yet another add-in straight from MSDN.

Try right-clicking on the image and choosing “Image Format.”

For my wife (Microsoft Office Word 2007 (12.0.4518.1014) MSO (12.0.6020.5000)) you then clicked the “Layout” tab and have to choose something different than “In Line with Text.”

In my copy (Microsoft Office Word 2007 (12.0.6331.5000) SP1 MSO (12.0.6320.5000)) I could not do that at all.  Although I noticed several things:

• You can right-click the image and choose “Text Wrapping” then choose something different than “In Line with Text.”
• You can select the image and then your “Picture Tools” tab should be available with one sub-category called “Format.”  In that area you can choose the “Position” button which lets you select from text wrapping and layout options (again select something other than “In Line with Text.”)
• You can alternatively hit the “Text Wrapping” button (instead of the “Position” button) and quickly choose a different text wrap option.
• And finally right-clicking and choosing “Format Picture” does not offer me ANYTHING useful in correct text wrapping or layout.

The Linux Cookbook: Tips and Techniques for Everyday Use

Two particularly useful (at least for me) commands are removing numerous files or completely eradicating a given directory.

The quickest way to delete numerous files:
find /parent/directory -type f -iname '*jpg' | xargs rm -f

The quickest way to remove a non-empty directory:
rm -rf /directory

Additional usage examples.  Found a shell programming example.

XP – http://vlaurie.com/computers2/Articles/environment.htm

Vista – http://vistaonwindows.com/environment_variables.html

You’ll note that the Vista page is basically the XP page.

Linux – http://lowfatlinux.com/linux-environment-variables.html

You’ll note that this is a reference and doesn’t serve as a printout of the ‘env‘ command.

Robin Keir has a nice utility for outputting MD5, SHA1 and CRC32.

A convenient use for this functionality is to place a shortcut to the program in the SendTo directory (C:\Documents and Settings\[name]\SendTo) so you can send arbitrary files to it from the Explorer shell.

In Vista you can get there via a WinKey+R (runbox) and typing:

%appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo

For the XP version:

%homepath%\SendTo

You can quickly do it from a command-line with:

regsvr32.exe dynamicLinkLibrary.dll

…and to unregister you simply throw a switch:

regsvr32.exe /u dynamicLinkLibrary.dll

However I ran across a nifty shell utility that apparently has been in front of my eyes for years.

RegSvrEx

For ActiveX developers, adds items to the shell context menu of DLLs and COXs that provides registration and unregistration – like running regsvr32, but much more convenient.

You can also grab the VC++6 / ATL source code for RegSvrEx here.

Make sure to check out both pages of Mike Lin’s site.

NOTE: I’m adding this to my debugging category so I don’t have to tag it.  Plus I think it is useful to debugging — perhaps not at the code level but at some point during the testing and implementation of the application.

Hey many thanks to the cats over at Amset.info for providing fairly detailed instructions on using ActiveSync over Bluetooth.  All works well over here except I had to modify some stuff for it to actually work.

Seriously, the ONLY way I got it to work in Vista was this:

Yeah Amset, I bit off your clever watermark everything because people are asses and steal other people’s intellectual property.  Word.

Here is the awesome pairing article:

Pair Windows XP/Vista With Windows Mobile 5.0 and Windows Mobile 6