New Colors Game in WPF

Last year I posted a small MFC application on my blog, called Colors Game, about covering with a single color a grid initially colored in six colors. It wasn’t a big deal of an application, but it was fun and recently I decided to write a WPF version of that MFC game. This is the … Read more

Alchemy 2.0

Alchemy 2.0 brings a modified layout, a set of 44 new elements (to a total of 444), hints, and translation to Hebrew. The most reported bug for Alchemy so far has been the layout mess on small resolution systems, such as netbooks. It wasn’t a bug actually, but a feature. The application required a higher … Read more

Generate Output from T4 at Build Time

Text templates (aka T4) is a great feature in Visual Studio, that proves helpful in many scenarios. I use it for instance in developing Alchemy. However, it has a significant drawback: it does not generate code automatically when you build your solution. To build the files and generate their output you have to manually run … Read more

Finding Installed Applications with VC++

Finding applications installed on a machine (the ones that you see in Control Panel Add/Remove programs) could be a little bit tricky, because there isn’t a bulletproof API or method. Each of the available methods has its own weak points. WMI is slow and can actually be disabled on a machine. MSI API only shows … Read more