Developer Express have won each of the 8 (eight!!) categories we entered for this year’s asp.netPRO Magazine Reader’s Choice Awards. Wow!

The categories we entered were Best Add-in, Best Charting and Graphics Tool, Best Component Set, Best Grid, Best Navigation Suite, Best Online Editor, Best Printing/Reporting Tool and Best Scheduling/Calendar Tool. Our overall package DXperience was also named Product of the Year. Look here for more info, the official thank-you to everybody and a few words f… …

Using Local Security Policy settings (specifically the one called “User Account Control: Switch to the secure desktop when prompting for elevation”), I can modify Vista’s behaviour when showing elevation prompts, so that the elevation dialog is simply shown as a normal window on the current desktop. I like this behaviour much better, but I’m wondering if there’s any security related reason why the so-called secure desktop is actually more secure. If you know, please tell me!

It appears I’ve managed to do a pretty stupid thing - personally I rather feel like Windows let me do a stupid thing, but that’s probably a matter of perspective ;-)

Anyway, I was trying out some things with UAC, looking at the way different elevation prompts are displayed depending on whether or not the current user is an Administrators member or not, and so on. Previously I was working in what appears to be the default configuration, which my user account being a member of the local Administ …

There’s a pretty big problem with shell extensions when you try to run 64 bit Windows — they either come in 64 or 32 bit varieties, and each “group” of extensions will only be loaded into a corresponding host application. In other words, Windows Explorer runs as a 64 bit executable by default and it only loads shell extensions for 64 bit. Many alternative file manager tools only come in 32 bit versions so far, and they will only load 32 bit extensions.

Some extensions come in both 32 bit and …

There are several events coming up in the next few weeks, where I’m going to be speaking. Hope to meet some of you there!

If you haven’t considered coming to any of these events, now is the time to do so — there’s lots of stuff going on, and since all of these events happen “off the beaten track”, we hope to see some people there who couldn’t easily make it to the more “standard” event locations in Reading or Dublin. Here’s where I’m going to be: VBUG Spring Conference, Birmingham, UK - April …

Granted, I’m a bit late mentioning this, but I still want to do it. Microsoft gave me another MVP award in the C# category on April 1st. I’m honored — thank you very much, Microsoft, and the various people involved.

As usual, I hope to find the time one day to do a bit more blogging than I’ve done in the last year or so. At least I am finding time to do a lot of speaking at user groups and events. If I haven’t been at your group and you would like me to, feel free to contact me!

I was fighting some problems with SlickRun for a while after installing 64 bit Vista on my machine recently. I noticed issues with powershell (SlickRun was always running the 32 bit version of it, even though the path explicitely specified the 64 bit version), and when I wanted to create a command to run SnippingTool, it turned out to be impossible… there are some very weird things going on in 64 bit Windows.

For example, Explorer shows me SnippingTool.exe in c:\windows\system32 (`system …