No more Rover when searching

For months, I’ve been annoyed by that little dog, Rover, that appears when performing a file search in Windows XP. He’s slow, he’s cute, and I just want him to go away. Fortunately, I found out how to send him packing back to the doghouse today. Click on “Change Preferences” … Continue reading

dnrTV features Venkat on .NET Generics

dnrTV’s March 9th episode featured Venkat Subramaniam giving an interactive demonstration of .NET Generics. The entire video tutorial is about an hour long. I thought it was quite useful. It’s fantastic being able to watch an expert in this area as he writes code and explains what he’s doing while … Continue reading

Restarting Windows services in C#

It’s dead simple to restart a Windows service in C#. I’m a little shocked at how easy it is actually, given some of the other things I’ve found to be so ugly about the language. public void RestartService(string name) { ServiceController service = new ServiceController(name); service.Stop(); Thread.Sleep(2500); service.Start(); Thread.Sleep(2500); } … Continue reading

Decoding COM HRESULT error codes

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m currently slogging through the melancholic mire of testing .NET/C# code. In the process, I’ve been receiving exceptions which give an HRESULT code in hex (i.e. 8×80020005) and not much else. That got me to wondering what these HRESULTs are and how to … Continue reading