“You are making my point!”

I have been doing quite a few presentation these days. One of the pains of making PowerPoint presentation is having to adjust my screen resolution. I have a 1920×1200 wide screen and I have to “down-size” it to 1024×768 in most cases. This gives me headaches because my nicely laid-out desktop icons are all messed up when I downsize.

I finally had enough and began to write a program to save and restore the icon locations. A few minutes into messing with Windows API calls, I stumbled upon this post that had the exact thing I was looking for. So I simply download the code (C++), compiled it, and it ran as smooth as silk. Now I simply launch this little sucker before I adjust my screen resolution, save the icon positions; later on after I restore my original screen resolution, I just click one button and all my icons go back to where they are before!  Big-up for the Code Guru Jeroen-bart Engelen.

Some day if I find myself bored, I might try to port this thing to C#. But somehow I don’t quite see the point; it is a bunch of jumble-mumble Win32 API calls anyways.

I attended last week’s Connecticut .NET User Group meeting in Microsoft’s Farmington, CT office to hear a presentation on SQL Server 2005 and BI, but ended up giving the talk on Open XML. The original speaker didn’t show up. I happened to have my laptop with me, and my Open XML presentation still hot from the stove. So I went up and asked SB (the organizer) if I can give the talk so long as people are already here. He was more than happy to have someone talk about something, anything. So I delivered the presentation to a roomful of fellow .NETers. It was an exciting and fun experience.

You can download the slides from here.

I am giving a presentation on Office 2007 Open XML format in the Code Camps 6 event held at Microsoft office in Waltham, MA. Here is the whole schedule. And the following is my session:

Technical Areas

I was trying to work on some cool OpenXML format for the new Office 2007 System. After I downloaded and installed the .NET Framework 3.0, I couldn’t find the essential .NET assembly WindowsBase.dll that is critical for what I need to do. After much searching around, online and in my harddrive, I found out that .NET Framework 3.0 creates this little directory in C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.0. All the goodies including WindowsBase.dll are in here. Doh! Why they didn’t possibly make this a little less obvious is simply beyond me.