Dev Blog

We recently encountered a problem writing large files using OpenXML from an Office add-in. When run as an execuable the same code doesn’t fail. The relevant part of the error message is “Unable to determine the identity of domain” which is from an IsolatedStorageException even though, at the time of the error, the code […]

A problem for the design challenged is the ability to create acceptable icons for desktop applications or for a web site. So it’s great to discover IconWorkshop from Axialis. The idea of the product is simple: compose an icon by layering visual components. The components are just PNG files with an alpha […]

I have a reproducible case of VS 2008 just exiting without provocation, warning or information. It’s begun occurring since I installed the latest Silverlight 3.0 Tools for VS and let the Windows automatic updater installer install IE 8.
The step to reproduce and a workaround follow:

WPF 3.5 sp1 introduced the ability to use pixel shaders to improve the performance of some graphic effects and the WPF team has provided code for many example shaders and transition effects (see WPF Pixel Shader Effects Library). This CodePlex project also includes an example application to show the different effects and transitions between […]

We’ve started to use Silverlight which is a great idea hampered by terrible execution. Here’s a link to a control we’ve created and made a available (see previous post or goto http://www.lyquidity.com/silverlight). And this is part of the problem. Why is it necessary for a company to have make available something as fundamental […]

Background
Silverlight seems to be missing many controls which is surprising given its 2.0 designation.  Among the facilities I want to use is a modal message box but the only built-in options are to use the alert method or MessageBox.Show.  Neither of these is appealling and both seem to go against my perception of the grain […]

Of course it wouldn’t be very British to be unequivocally positive about something (see the last post on AWS) so here’s a bit of a gripe about Windows on EC2 so I can remain in character.  But there’s a solution here as well.
EC2 instances of any flavor are not much use without persistent storage and […]

Download application and source code
This utility for Windows provides a system or notification tray “applet” to show who is on the phone (assuming you are using Asterisk.  The applet can be activated by selecting an option from the popup menu attached to the icon in the system tray but it will automatically activate when your extension rings.
How it works
The applet […]

For any practical size spreadsheet, the organization of calculations across sheets in a workbook may have a small an impact the first time a calculation is executed.  To gain some understanding of the likely impact it can be useful to review how Excel stores workbook data because some of the structures used either have a […]

The “standard” appearance of web pages is changing all the time.  Once a good web site had a poor quality graphic.  Now pop-ups, sliding menus, carousels, animations and so on - tastefully done of course - are features of any self-respecting web site.  But its not easy.  So its great to come across the Yahoo! User […]