Wes' Puzzling Blog

I was playing around with some C# generics today and I began thinking about different things I could do with them. Then I began to wonder what happens if you give a static class generic type parameters? I wasn't even sure it would compile but sure enough it did. Then I tried to come up with an example where this might come in handy. Here is a simple factory pattern example using a C# generics:

If you haven't read How to store secrets on a machine from Keith Brown's book-in-a-wiki, you should it is a great read. It talks about how to use the DPAPI to store data locally on a machine. Here is an excerpt from it about the ProtectedData class provided in .Net 2.0:

I was writing a login form for an application I'm working on and I decided I didn't want to use the standard '*' as my password character. I wanted to use the black circle (●), the same one that windows login uses. I figured out what the Unicode value for it was (0x25CF) and then I tried to set that as the password character for my textbox through the designer but no luck it would only take standard ASCII characters. So I decided to set in my form constructor, like:

Thanks to Scott's comment I went on the hunt to figure out how to tell if an executable is a console application or not. After much hunting I figured out how to do it, here is what I came up with. Enjoy!

• Auto complete commands - as you type you are given a suggestion list matching what you have typed and the command that matches the closest is filled in for you
• Smart suggestion list - the commands you use the most often appear at the top of the suggestion list, and the commands are pre-populated with common commands that someone might run like:
  • Start Menu Shortcuts
  • Control Panel Applets
  • Favorites
  • Recently Opened Documents
  • Common Windows Commands - i.e. My Computer, My Pictures, Administrative Tools, etc.
  • All Executables in the Path
• Easily create short commands - being able to define short strings to run the command of your choice, like defining "ie" to open up Internet Explorer.
• Command hotkeys - being able to assign a hotkey for any of your custom commands.
• List computer shares on network - when you type "\\" it provides a list of the computers on your LAN and then when you type "\" again it provides a list of the shares on that computer (including hidden shares)

I have been planning on talking about cleaning up your windows startup for a while but it looks like Jonathan Hardwick bet me too it with his excellent post What is all this stuff doing on my computer?. I do however have a couple more things to add.