Adam Caudill

Startup Mistakes

For those looking to get into the startup/ISV scene, Paul Graham’s latest work is a great read. The 18 Mistakes that Kill Startups takes an interesting look at some of the larger issues to avoid while forming a new company. Personally, I’d call this one a must read.

bbPress Released

After 2 years, my favorite forum software has been officially released. I’ve been a big fan of bbPress since it’s early days, I even had at least one patch accepted. So I guess one could say I was a developer on the project (although, a very minor one).

It’s great to see this project make it. If you’re looking for high-quality PHP-based forum solution without the weight of something like vB, then bbPress is the answer.

Final Vista Public Beta Released

The final public beta build (5744) of the next generation of Windows has been released (via shell: revealed). With this announcement it looks like Vista will indeed be on time. For awhile I was wondering if Vista had any chance of making it, but it seems that it will indeed. While this is certainly good news, the RTM build is the one that has my interest.

Playing with a release candidate can be fun, there’s no doubt about it; but the real fun starts when you can see how things work and behave on the final – (hopefully) working build. I’ve got a ton of software to test, and a number of applications to update to take advantage of the latest goodies Vista offers – that’s the fun part.

Not a good idea…

I’ve been both a subscriber and fan of Valleyschwag since it was launched, that is, until yesterday. And not by my choice mind you, they canceled everybodies subscription. When the second issue was shipped in late May, they reported having over 1,500 members each paying $15 a month for the service. I can only guess what the subscriber count would look like now, after having a few months to grow.

They’ve thrown that all away now, sending the following notice to all the subscribers:

A look into Vista

Ever wondered how they do things inside of Microsoft? As a developer that makes extensive uses of Microsoft technologies and tools, I’m always interested in an insight into their development process. Well, if you’re like me, then I may have a real treat for you.

Vinny Pasceri, the AERO Program Manager for Microsoft has posted an great insight on the (fairly new) Windows Client Team Blog. This is a great peak into what the design process looks like, and even includes what may be the first publicly released feature spec. This makes for a great read, I highly recommend taking a close look at this article and the included spec.

EventArgs: No need to pass a new Instance

If you look at the code I write, seeing a line similar to the following would be fairly common:

RaiseEvent LoadComplete(Me, New EventArgs)

Yesterday, I wouldn’t have given this a second thought, but today, the story is a bit different. A friend of mine pointed me to an interesting comment by David Kean (from Microsoft) on the MSDN Wiki indicating that the line above is actually wrong!

So, based on his comment, I should be using EventArgs.Empty instead of creating a new instance, something like this:

Make XP Pretty

While going through my (long) list of RSS-feeds that I monitor, I found this gem of an article: Vista Transformation Pack: Vista-ize your XP. The Vista Transformation Pack is a clever little application that moves your XP desktop several steps closer to the beauty that is Vista. While the ’transformation’ doesn’t give you all of the new UI goodies that come with Vista, it does add a fair bit of eye candy.

VB.NET 2005 Interop Toolkit

The VB Team has just announced the release of a VB.NET / VB6 Interop toolkit, complete with source. For those of us that work in shops that still maintain a fair number of legacy applications, this could be quite useful. Here’s the description straight from Microsoft:

The Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0 is a free add-in that simplifies the process of displaying .NET WinForms in a Visual Basic 6 application. Instead of upgrading the entire code base, these applications can now be extended one form at a time. The goal is a phased upgrade, with production releases at the end of each iteration containing both Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic .NET forms running in the same Visual Basic 6 process.

Read more…

Running RegEdit as SYSTEM

While facing an interesting research challenge, digging into the inner working of Windows, I realized that I needed to change a registry value. That’s simple enough, I fire up RegEdit, make the change, then politely as RegEdit knows how, it told me that I couldn’t change the value! Being one that hates when my computer tells me I can’t do something, I had to find another option.

So after some research, I found my answer: sc. This is a great little utility (included with Windows), and made the task of running an application as SYSTEM* much easier. At this point some of you may be wondering why I didn’t just use RunAs instead, as it’s designed to allow execution as another user. Well, from all that I’ve found, there is no way to get RunAs to spawn a process as SYSTEM, one of the downsides of SYSTEM not being a true user.