Why lossless?
Lossless audio is used on various media, including studio masters, CD, DVD-Audio (via MLP) and Blu-ray (via Dolby TrueHD, which is technically a rebrand of and an extension to MLP, and DTS-HD Master Audio). All of these, when decoded, will result in a pulse-code modulated signal identical to the source, unlike the popular MP3 […]

Command-line interface tools. We usually prefer to write these when we need a lightweight application to get work done.
Some operations can be lengthy, or we simply want to present the a visual indicator of progress to the user. For this purpose I usually update Console.Title for simplicity’s sake.
However, if the tool is intended for a […]

I’d like to wish everyone a very happy and successful new year!
This month I will be posting useful code snippets and a series on high-definition audio.
I would like to focus on the now-popular Blu-ray disc format and decoding DTS-HD Master Audio streams to PCM and compressing with the open-source FLAC codec in C#. The next […]

Just a couple of days ago Microsoft MVP lead Alessandro Teglia announced the newly awarded and renewed Most Valuable Professionals for 2009 — I would like to congratulate all of them on their achievements. Rock on!
I am also very happy and proud to be given the award for Visual C# this year. It is my programming language of […]

With Windows Vista, Microsoft introduced a whole new window manager which provides a better experience to the user and an independent graphics surface to us developers by taking advantage of graphics acceleration hardware (your graphics card or integrated GPU).
In a three-part blog post, I will show you how to use a wrapper around the Desktop […]

I have recently worked on Windows Sidebar Styler and version 2.0.6 is now available.
Among the improvements is instant application of styles as well as the resizable Windows Sidebar feature. The latter is especially useful when Windows Sidebar is docked on the left. Added are more localizations and Alky for Applications is supported for use in […]

Christoffer Andersson–an MVP in Active Directory and a very good friend of mine–recently released the first beta of his Fine-Grained Password Policy Tool. If you are an IT planner or analyst or simply experimenting with the new features of Windows Server 2008 in terms of domain-wise security, you will like to deploy the application. It includes […]

An updated version of Windows Sidebar Styler (v2.0.5) has been made available. Please check the previous post for download links as well as updated documentation.
Additions include support for Gadget resource localization, translations of the application UI, as well as fixed issues with VAIO. If you are interested in helping localize Windows Sidebar Styler in your […]

A new version of Windows Sidebar Styler available. Click here for more information.

Windows Sidebar Styler is an application which takes advantage of various technologies introduced in Windows Vista in order to provide extensions to the existing functionality of Windows Sidebar.
Custom styles allow users to customize the appearance of Windows Sidebar so that it fits […]

Please note that this version of the application is no longer supported. Visit this page for the latest binaries.