Christian Schormann posted a video [http://electricbeach.org/?p=98] that demonstrates the new Visual State Manager (aka VSM). The quick and dirty is that the VSM allows you to customize the states of a control. This means you can change the visual presentation of a control for its mouseover state, p

I have many colleagues who have touted the merits of dark backgrounds in Visual Studio and I have tried several variations, yet I always end up back on white. It is not so much that the background needs to be white, rather it is more that I have never found a good mixture of foreground colors that w

Someone asked me yesterday what tools I use while writing a book. Organization is absolutely critical to me when writing. I have so many thoughts flying around that its really difficult to keep them all straight. That is why its imperative to have some tools to help organize the book writing process

Brian Peek [http://www.brianpeek.com/blog/], one of the authors of the MSDN Coding4Fun [http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/] web site, announced that his book is now for sale at Amazon [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596520743?tag=brianpcom-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creati

I started a "wish list" post in the ADO.NET Entity Framework forums [http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/showpost.aspx?postid=3391412&siteid=1&sb=0&d=1&at=7&ft=11&tf=0&pageid=0] last week. I fed it with a few items to get things going and it has taken off with gre