I'd like to share my top ten list of MSDN articles which have been published 2006. What follows is a completely subjective top-10 and ofcourse I can only take those articles into consideration which I have read. Customizing generated Web Service proxies in Visual Studio 2005 Deliver The Power Of Spy++ To Windows Forms With Our New Tool Improving Application ......

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I just installed a VPC running Windows 2003 Server. Virtual PC is emulating a Soundblaster 16 but Windows 2003 does not provide any drivers. Thus to get sound working (either for playback or recording) you need to manually install the appropriate drivers. The two driver files you need are wdma_ctl.inf and ctlsb16.sys. Windows XP is having those two ......

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Oh yes, the following took me a while to find out ;) The WSE-enabled proxy class is not thread-safe. When the proxy class is used to make multiple asynchronous calls to a Web service method, each call must be completed using the EndXX method before another call may be made. WSE proxies contain state that is used for each method call. Thisis the RequestSoapContext ......

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Lately the Visual Studio 2005 Designer drives me crazy. When I worked with multiple Forms and Custom User Controls, it took just a while and I could not open the Design View anymore. Switching to the Design view, brought up a friendly error message:Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more informationFirst ......

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Are Team System and Team Suite the same thing? No, they are not. Let me explain the difference between Team System and Team Suite. As you might know, a level above the Visual Studio 2005 Professional Version, you find the Visual Studio Team Editions.Each Team Edition offers special features, which Microsoft assumes useful, for the specific roles they ......

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If you are developing ASP.NET you can easily use the Application_Error event within the Global.asax Syntax file for your global exception handling needs. However, this approach is not available for Web Services applications. The Application_Error event is not fired if your web method throws an exception. The reason for this is that the HTTP handler ......

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Managing and reducing the complexity of your software is important. Complexity makes your software more error prone and harder to maintain. I believe in this tenet and I am a disciple of the KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid aka Keep it super simple) principle. However, the obvious question at hand is: How to measure complexity and thus identify where the ......

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Let’s assume you have all (most) of the framework versions installed on your machine. How can you determine which application uses which framework version ? Reminder: There is plenty of information about how to determine which framework version is installed. The question at hand, is about which framework version does an application actually use ! Microsoft ......

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If you add a new item to your project, Visual Studio applies a default template which is responsible for creating the sceleton of the selected item. It might come in handy to modify the default "create new item" behaviour and customize it so it fits your individual needs. The process to do so is pretty straightforward. All templates are stored in a ......

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One nice features in VS 2005 is that the Document Outline Window is available for Windows Forms. In Visual Studio 2003 it was only available for Web Forms. You open the the Document Outline either via View | Other Windows | Document Outline or with the Ctrl+W,U keyboard shortcut. The cool thing about the Document Outline Window is the ability to list ......

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I start most of my application using start - run. This a very convenient shortcut for running applications. Sometimes your favorite application does not start via "start - run" or you might want to modify an existing shortcut. Technically when you use the run dialog windows is executing the ShellExecute command. When the method is executing there are ......

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C# 2.0 offers a new null coalescing operator: ?? You can look it up in C# Language Specification (12.3.3.29).The ?? Operator “take the first value if it is not null, otherwise the second.”I consider this a pretty smart way to do some null comparision where you would usually use an if==null construct. Here is a quick example: string user = “Hannes”; ......

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If you are developing with Visual Studio 2005 you probably have seen the *.vshost.exe files inside of your bin folder or you saw the process running while debugging. The vshost.exe file is coming from Visual Studio and serves a very good purpose. The vshost.exe is a new Visual Studio 2005 feature and is actually a hosting process. It serves mainly three ......

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As you probably know shared assemblies are stored in the global assembly cache (GAC) which is located at c:\windows\assembly.If you navigate to this folder you might be surprised to see that is looks a lil different then you might expect. What you actually see in the windows explorer is an aggregated view of different folders. Open up a dos prompt and ......

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One thing I love most about Maxthon is the integrated capability to handle mouse gestures. Mouse gestures are simple symbols that you "draw" on your screen using your mouse. When you perform a mouse gesture that can be recognised, the according associated action will be performed. Once you get used to mouse gestures, you find yourself trying to use ......

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