Tools
UPDATE: Added support for importing tracked forums and topics.
I'm in the process of converting my forums from Community Server to AspNetForum. While CS may support every single feature under the sun, its very big and unwieldly to work with. The more recent 2007 and 2008 versions are better, but still behemoth. I just want to drop in one simple forum with a couple subgroups, not host a million forums and blogs on my site. For this, AspNetForum fits the bill exactly.
There's no official importer for Community Server to AspNetForum, so I wrote my own. It turns out to be fairly...
Lutz Roeder's Reflector is one of the most useful tools out there. It's a disassembler that allows you to point at any assembly and break down the code. Scott Hansleman shows off a new PowerShell language plugin for Reflector as well as a nice snapshot of the other addins. It's a great read -- I keep forgetting about all the useful plugins you can add to Reflector.
As I develop, I often have images that are bitmaps or other formats that I want to convert to transparent .png's for use in a website. I whipped up a little app that does a bmp2png conversion, using the RegistryHelper class to hook the right click context menu.
Converting an image in .NET is very straightforward, as long as you are doing a conversion from and to a .NET supported image format. Just load the image using the System.Drawing classes, and then save it as the image format you want. Making a color transparent is easy as well -- call...
For several programs, I've wanted to be able to add a shell context menu item for a file that runs an exe. After some research, I came up with the following information. This menu is controlled by certain registry entries under the HKCR (Classes Root) entry. In HKCR, there are two relevant entries for each file extension: the actual extension, and the handler for that extension. For .bmp, for example, the extension key is as follows:
The key part of the extension key is the default string value that points to the handler for this extension, in this case Paint.Picture. Here's the...
Update: Just released a small tweak to support the latest versions of WLM.
I've been using Yahoo! Music Unlimited for almost a year now. It's a great service. Cheap ($4.99/mo), fairly good selection, and 192kbs quality. The only problem is, it doesn't integrate with MSN Messenger/Windows Live Messenger's now playing display. There is a third-party plugin that sort of provides this functionality, but it's old, hasn't been updated, and doesn't work properly with the latest versions of WLM.
So I pulled together some information and code from a few different sources and whipped up my own plugin, using C# and VS 2005....