Ultralingua: o meu amigo!

In my recent learning of the Portuguese language, I have found the Ultralingua dictionary to be very helpful!

Ultralingua.com

It has iPhone, Mac and Windows versions and I've found the iPhone and Mac versions to be excellent. Windows, while functional, feels a bit like a red-headed stepchild. However it's still an excellent tool no matter which flavor you download it.

It's not free (it has a free trial), but it is definitely worth the very affordable price tag - especially the iPhone version!!!

Free Wireless at Peet's

Finally! Wireless at Peet's Coffee & Tea and it's FREE!!!

Peet's Coffee & Tea

Looks like they one-upped their main competitor again. Now awesome coffee and free wireless!

Now if we could just get them to also offer non-baked-goods for food.. hmmm...

twitterfeed

OK... as usual, I'm a little slow finding out and signing up for the latest social productivity tools, and this time I recently discovered twitterfeed from seeing it being used by some folks who I'm following on Twitter:

twitterfeed.com : feed your blog to twitter - post RSS to twitter automatically

...it's very handy and simple to use.

WPF Window Events - Loaded or Initialized?

So I was trying to determine which event to use for handling window initialization in WPF, since there seems to be a couple of options that are a little different from Windows Forms: Initialized and Loaded.

Thankfully MSDN came to the rescue and clarified things a bit in the documentation for the Initialized event:

[Initialized] will be raised whenever the EndInit or OnVisualParentChanged methods are called. Calls to either method could have come from application code, or through the Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) processor behavior when a XAML page is processed.

Whether you choose to handle Loaded or Initialized depends on your requirements. If you do not need to read element properties, intend to reset properties, and do not need any layout information, Initialized might be the better event to act upon. If you need all properties of the element to be available, and you will be setting properties that are likely to reset the layout, Loaded might be the better event to act upon. Be careful of reentrancy if your handler resets any properties that are interpreted by the layout system to mean that a new layout pass is required. (You might need to check the FrameworkPropertyMetadata values on the property if you are unsure of which properties can require a new layout pass if they are changed.)

Disabling Windows Desktop Search Explorer Integration

If anyone hates the steaming turd that is Windows Desktop Search's Explorer Integration as much as I do (i.e. the search utility that can't find anything), please read Scott Hanselman's blog article outlining the very simple fix to disable this piece of total crap software:

Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - How to disable Windows Desktop Search explorer integration after installing Office 2007

I feel much better now.

Hope this helps!

Visual Studio Tip: "You Are Here"

This is a tip that I got from a colleague several years ago when I was developing in VB 6, but I've kept doing it in Visual Studio and C# and it still works great...


At the beginning of the day I like to know exactly where I left off, so one way of accomplishing that is to just insert "you are here..." in the body of your code where you left off. This accomplishes two things:

1. it prevents compilation since "you are here..." is not valid code
   
2. the IntelliSense picks up the self-inflicted bug in the code and insterts red squigglies to show you the exact location where you left off...

Here's an example:



Hope this helps!

Rumor: 3G iPhone to sell for US$199 | The Apple Core | ZDNet.com

If this rumor doesn't end up being even remotely close to reality I'm going to be totally bummed...

Rumor: 3G iPhone to sell for US$199 | The Apple Core | ZDNet.com

we'll see, but if it's at that price point, I'm buying TWO!