Brent Rockwood

If you consider yourself a serious Windows dev and you aren’t reading Mark’s blog, well, shame on you. Go there, now.

The Group Policy Management Console creates an XML report when you back up a GPO.  One of the things stored in that report is the name of the GPO.  That name is stored in a CDATA block and does not split the triad “]]>”.  Therefore, if you try to back up a GPO with a [...]

Today at work, two of us on my team were presented with a violation of FxCop rule CA1300.  The violation, in this case, discusses using an overload of the MessageBox.Show method that does not specify the reading direction (i.e. right to left or not).  The recommendation for fixing the violation is to search the parent [...]

Tim pointed at an interesting position paper by Nick Gall, VP Gartner.  The last few paragraphs really hit home for me.  Allow me to quote the parts I found most interesting…
The large set of WS-* specifications is almost entirely focused on recreating traditional middleware capabilities using XML as the syntax [...]While there is nothing wrong [...]

Rico Mariani has posted a list of all the methods in the .Net Framework and their relative costs as measured by number of allocations.  Handy stuff.

What does this mean?

I downloaded the awesome SysInternals Suite this afternoon for my laptop.  Many, if not most, of these apps are command line utilities.  However, because they came from the web, Vista (or XP SP2, if that’s your flavour) won’t let you run them from the command line until you open the file properties dialog and click “Unblock”.  Except [...]

I’d love to get rid of Acrobat Reader.  I only look at the odd PDF here or there and I don’t need something loaded on startup.  Also, it drives me nuts that Adobe puts their software update folder right in the middle of my documents folder.
I thought maybe I could just use Word, as it [...]