After installing a fresh copy of Windows I always spend a day or so disabling all those ‘handy’ features like ‘hiding my file extensions’, UAC, Bitlocker and other stuff I really don’t care about. ‘Do you really want to start Visual Studio?‘. Yes please, it’s what I do all day.
One of the most annoying dialogs is the ‘Do you want to scan and fix…” dialog. Let’s raise a semi modal dialog to tell the user there might be something wrong with the USB drive. I even had to re-read that sentence to be sure I read it correctly.
And then let’s suggest more options. In a new modal dialog! That’s two mouseclicks I have clicked at least a thousand times. Not a very nice user experience.
Chances of me wanting to scan and fix a USB drive that works properly? 0%
Chances of me wanting Windows 7 to burn my files for me? 0%
Chances of me choosing any of the other suggestions Windows gives me when I insert a disc or USB drive? Near 0%.
Disable the scan and fix dialog and autoplay dialog
Getting rid of the dialogs is easy. Open the control panel and search for ‘service’.
Click ‘view local services’ and find: ‘Shell hardware Detection’.
WARNING! Change these Windows settings at your own risk!
Disable the service. Windows will ask if you want to stop the Windows Image Acuisition (WIA) service also. On my laptop this was no problem and I can still scan images form FSViewer and Photoshop.
download demo project with the grid usercontrols
When I design in Photoshop and Expression Design, I use the grid and guides all the time to make sure all my visual elements are placed well. The artboard grid options in Expression Blend are limited to gridline spacing and I need more visual feedback like this:
In an ASP.NET application I usually place an image of a grid on my canvas div to see if everything is positioned correctly in all browsers. In Silverlight this can be solved even more nicely. I created a UserControl with some rectangles to mimic a design grid. I’ve added a ShowAtRuntime property so you don’t have to collapse the design grid if you want to test without the grid.
Just download the demo project and copy the controls folder to your project. Add a 5- or 6-column grid control to the layoutroot of your page and fill it out over the page. Make sure the gridcontrol is the first child of the layoutroot.
The controls are created for portait mode.
Small disclaimer: I had to guess the design grid dimensions of the Metro design language. If you find an error in my calculation please send me an email.
I ran my website www.toverstudio.nl through http://validator.w3.org and noticed that a link to Google maps was a source of invalid markup errors. Instead of encoding the link in ASP.NET, I shortened the link with bit.ly.
So instead of something like:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&q=Friedensengel,+Prinzregentenstra%C3%9Fe,+Bogenhausen+81675+M%C3%BCnchen,+Bayern,+Germany&aq=&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=53.87374,135.263672&ie=UTF8&geocode=FceT3gId5vSwAA&split=0&hq=&hnear=Friedensengel,+Prinzregentenstra%C3%9Fe,+Bogenhausen+81675+M%C3%BCnchen,+Bayern,+Germany&z=15
you get something like:
http://bit.ly/fnhsOm
Change suggested name
If you sign up to bit.ly, you can even change the suggested name. Instead of bit.ly/fnhsOm you can make up a name like: bit.ly/myshortenedlink. Works great!
