A life of the senior

     I am, like any other Windows based developer, extensively use services and software provided by the U.S. companies. But recently I started to see a strange message stating that the country where I live (Belarus now) is sanctioned by the United States and my IP addresses are blocked. So, we can't use their services any longer. Most probably, and I suspect that such decision was made based on the Russia-Ukraine war. Because earlier this year I could open any page on the web site without any issue. But how we, developers, are related to the war or even politician games?  For example, I see the following text on the Pluralsight.com web site: Because your IP address or billing address is associated with a country that is sanctioned by the United States, by U.S. law we are required to block your access to Pluralsight.com. If you believe you are receiving  this message in error, please contact ...@pluralsight.com The exact picture is shown on ...

Some time ago I was asked by the developer: what can be a cause when we see an old information in the Control Panel applet for our application? It can be a wrong description, old build version and etc. Well, it depends... First, I took a look at the  Add/Remove Programs tool displays installed programs incorrectly article. The list of OS is pretty old, so I don't think that you find the real cause there. Then I started looking at the source code. Due to the fact that Windows Installer projects were removed from the list of Visual Studio projects, we use WiX toolset for creating installers to deploy the software on other machines. Didn't find anything strange in the XML markup also, so decided to look at the .MSI file itself. The Orca.exe utility is a great help in such cases. See How to use the Orca database editor to edit Windows Installer files for more information. But there I didn't find any possible cause also. All properties were set according to the source f...

One of the widely spread tasks in word is to get the current word for processing it further. For example, you typed a single word and what to do some actions against it, or search in the dictionary (database) for such entries. I.e. do whatever you need. When you do the right click on the word you may see the context menu with the Synonyms entry: Do you look for a similar implementation? If so, this article will give you a good start! The Word object model provides the Selection class. Unfortunately it doesn't provide any information about the currently selected word, i.e. where exactly the user did the right click. As one of the possible ways, to get the job done you may use the MoveStart* and MoveEnd* methods of the Selection class. I included asterisks intentionally to draw your attention to the fact that you may find other methods / variations useful. So here I will give you the basics. The MoveStartUntil method of the Selection class moves the start position...

Some time ago I moved my system drive to the SSD rails. But getting updates from Microsoft that can take more than 5 Gb at a time I had to keep an eye how much free space is available. Then I started to think what can be removed or moved to another drives. I noticed that a lot of Windows Store Apps are installed and consume a quite big amount of expensive memory. For example, only one of the Store applications takes more than 1 Gb of space on the drive. So, I decided to change the picture dramatically and change the location of Windows Apps. In general, there are two main ways for getting the job done. 1. Change the value of the PackageRoot key in the windows registry.  You can find it in the following hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Appx Don't forget to restart the machine to apply the changes. That's it. 2. Move the original folder to a new drive and create a symbolic link instead. As a rule the Windows Apps installation f...