One of the great disappointments of a programmer’s workday is creating a component only to discover shortly after finishing that someone else had already created the exact same component. Happened to me the other day. Literally 30 minutes after quietly putting together a DevExpress DateEdit that only displayed years and months, I hear a coworker …

Many moons ago, in preparation for a major rewrite to my QuickShift application, I wrote a low level keyboard hook implementation in C#. The original version of QuickShift employed global hotkeys to respond to keyboard input, however that mechanism proved to offer less-than-ideal performance: When the OS recognizes a hotkey combination, it responds by posting …

This makes me laugh every time. Enjoy, but be aware this is NSFW! :-)

There has been a time or two when I’ve wanted to use an icon from shell32.dll or imageres.dll for my own purposes. But for some reason I was under the impression it was a huge pain in the ass to extract them. Not the case, as it turns out.

During my initial foray into VSTO office development two years ago, I was particularly frustrated by the severe lack of documentation on the subject. Unfortunately, it seems this is still something of a problem. It took me hours of googling the other day just to find a definitive list of all the ribbon callback signatures. …

This post has been updated. Check out the new version. When I first started coding QuickShift, I stumbled upon a blog post which described a Hotkey class the author had written based on the RegisterHotkey and UnregisterHotkey Windows API functions. I found it because someone had posted a link on this StackOverflow question which, as of …

Anybody else find it annoying that Microsoft Word doesn’t have a built-in function to scroll a document without moving the cursor? Well, no worries. Thanks to this guy there is a solution. Six lines of code, a couple keyboard shortcuts, and you’re good to go. Only thing I noticed is that I had to fully …