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Vista's User Account Control (UAC) improves security, but making it work smoothly requires a little more developer work. Find out what you need to know to code Vista UAC-aware applications.

A managed wrapper for accessing the Vista Core Audio API

Vista-like TaskDialog control for .NET Framework 2.0, compatible with Windows XP

This article describes how to use Visual Studio for developing a Vista Gadget.

This article tells you how to draw text and pictures correctly on your Vista form's extended glass area.

Growing up in the 80s, two of the concepts that drew me in to computer science were computers that were small enough to take with you (called "Luggables" then) and displays that were thin enough to hang on a wall. Technology has come a long way in that time-and the Ultra-Mobile class of personal computers that run the Windows Vista operating system is a great example of that progress. So what is a UMPC and why would I be interested in writing an application that is optimized for it?

Windows Vista introduces a new cryptography API to replace the old CryptoAPI, which has its roots in the early versions of Windows NT and Windows 95. Cryptography Next Generation (CNG) is meant to be a long-term replacement for the CryptoAPI, providing substitutes for all of the cryptographic primitives it offered. CNG supports all of the algorithms provided by the CryptoAPI, but goes much further and includes many new algorithms and a much more flexible design, providing developers with greater control over how cryptographic operations are performed and how algorithms work together to perform various operations.

When Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition appeared in 2002, developers were sometimes confused about whether to write code on a Tablet PC or if it were possible to develop Tablet PC applications on existing desktop computers.The solution turned out to be fairly straightforward, if less than intuitive. However, with the addition of Ultra-Mobile PCs (UMPCs), multiple releases of the Tablet and Touch Technology API, and now the Windows Vista operating system, this question arises again: What do you need to do to set up your developer environment and create applications for these form factors?

The Tablet PC SDK makes it easy to incorporate digital ink and handwriting analysis into applications; and now the InkAnalysis API (available in Windows Vista as well as downlevel to the Microsoft Windows XP operating system through a redistributable) takes it one step further. Actually, the InkAnalysis API exposes some of the lower-level functions that make handwriting recognition possible. It also exposes some functionality that can improve recognition results, support shapes, alternative recognition results, and spatial analysis. In this article, I will take a deeper look into what goes on behind the scenes and how to take advantage of the tablet team's hard work.

This article demonstrates a quick and easy-to-use implementation for cross-AppDomain communication in .NET by leveraging Windows native messaging. The XDMessaging library is based on code developed to aid rapid development for a recent Vista project that required a lot of cross-AppDomain communication in a locked-down environment. It proved to be extremely useful in a number of scenarios where .NET Remoting would have been impractical, if not impossible, and actually solved more problems than I could have imagined due to its simplicity. The library is intended to send messages between multiple applications in a same-box scenario. For example, a task-tray application might want to communicate with or monitor a separate desktop application. The library does not implement cross-domain communication across a network, for which case .NET Remoting is sufficient.