Spellbook

I uploaded release 0.9.0 of EvilDesk tonight. I realized that I hadn’t made a release in over a year, so I tidied up a few bits and pieces and uploaded it. Feel free to review the changelog if you’re curious.

Highlights include an improved dock style toolbar, a launcher plugin (type the name of a program or document to find it and run it, instead of poking around the start menu), simpler configuration of the toolbar positioning, translations for German and French, less bugs and support for 64-bit Windows.

Enjoy!

Original post by wez+via_rss@netevil.org (Wez Furlong)

For the past couple of days I’ve been in (rainy|sunny) Seattle attending a web development summit hosted on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. Microsoft invited a number of “influentials” from web development communities outside of the usual MS camps; the folks attending were mostly of a PHP background, but there was one Rails guy and a couple of others with more of a .Net background.

At first you’d think that MS had set out to brainwash us all into talking about how great their new bits are. While that was true to a certain extent, they were very keen to find out what we all thought about those bits–did they suck? how could they be improved? and so on.

For me, the more interesting parts included:

Feature focus on IIS7

The IIS7 that will ship with Vista is designed to make things easier for a web developer. There are some innovations like per-directory configuration files called web.config files. These are effectively an XML equivalent to Apache .htaccess files and will make things much easier for transporting configuration from a local dev box up to a staging or even production server. The IIS guys re-engineered the core of IIS to run in a modular fashion, making it much easier to build in custom authentication or URL rewriting facilities, for example.

This may not sound like a big deal to apache users, but it’s a significant stride in the right direction as far as feature parity between apache and IIS is concerned–it makes it easier to create an app that will run “the same” on IIS as it does on Apache.

Read more…

Original post by wez+via_rss@netevil.org (Wez Furlong)

You can prevent users from changing associations via Windows Explorer’s Tools / Folder Options / File Types tab.

1. Start Regedit
2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ Explore
3. Create REG_DWORD data type NoFileAssociate
4. Give it a value of 1

I think its great utility, It save me much time and work!
Try it!

ERUNT The Emergency Recovery Utility NT

The Show Desktop icon is not an ordinary program shortcut. If the icon is deleted, the procedure for re-creating the icon is not obvious. To re-create the Show Desktop icon, follow these steps:

1. Click Start , click Run, type notepad, and then click OK.
2. In Notepad, type the following text on individual lines:
   [Shell]
   Command=2
   IconFile=explorer.exe,3
   [Taskbar]
   Command=ToggleDesktop
3. Click File, click Save As, and then save the file to your desktop as “Show Desktop.scf“.

Note Notepad may automatically append a .txt extension to the file name. Remove this extension if present. The file name should be “Show Desktop.scf”.
The file must now be moved to the correct folder in the user profile to appear in the Quick Launch toolbar. To do this, use one of the following methods.