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Tag Archives: tutorials

Hide the Undock Button in Windows XP in Five Steps

If you have a Windows XP notebook, and love to use the Run menu item, chances are you’ve occasionally hit “E” instead of  “R” when you bring up your start menu.  The result? Windows ejects the PC from it’s dock and forces you to re-dock it before you can carry on with your work.  It’s only about a 90-second process, but it’s annoying as hell and will completely take you ‘out of the zone’ when you’re in the middle of your project.

  1. Open the registry editor (Start -> Run -> regedit)
  2. Open one of the applicable keys:
    • Current User: [HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesExplorer]
    • All Users: [HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesExplorer]
  3. Right-click the Explorer folder -> New -> DWORD Value and call it NoStartMenuEjectPC (case-sensitive!)
  4. Right-click NoStartMenuEjectPC -> Modify
  5. Choose one of the following values to set the behaviour you want:
    • type 1 to hide the undock button
    • type 0 to show the undock button

Now you can safely use your keyboard shortcuts without worrying about accidentally undocking your computer.

ASP.NET MVC Tutorials

A couple of weeks ago at Mix ’09 the ASP.NET MVC team announced the RTW (release-to-web) version of the MVC framework. I’ve been looking at the framework and playing with pieces of it for a few months now, but due to school & work commitments haven’t really had a chance to give it a good run through, or build anything meaningful with it.

This past week I’ve gone back to the ASP.NET website and discovered that there is now a long list of tutorials which have been put in an order to help make the major features of the MVC framework more learnable, particularly for those of us who haven’t had that MVC-heavy comp-sci education.  The tutorials come in either written or video form (there is some overlap) and do provide some good step-by-step instructions for exploring the new methodology.

Expect me to get into more detail about the ins-and-outs of the MVC framework in upcoming editions of the new podcast (more details soon, I promise!!)

You can, of course, download and use the MVC framework with Visual Studio 2009 without the tutorials, but I would highly recommend giving the first few a once-over.  Have a look at the tutorial site and see what you think.