It is interesting that the Australian Government is getting into the act on releasing a free web filter for use with windows, I wonder if they are connecting up to the Vista parental controls settings built into vista. I have to wonder if they provide...

A tip when making Meringue is to use a teaspoon of vinegar (or lemon juice, something acidic) in the meringue mixture, it makes it a little tangier and works a lot better. Just a small amount of lemon juice can work really well with a lemon meringue pie...

A co-worker (Kyle Olson) came up with a list of items about how to take responsability for your code that I thought was quite useful. I am reposting the article here. I would like to add that one thing you should always be thinking about when writing...

On April the 11th Kurt Vonnegut died , one of my favourite authors. He wrote amazing books and short stories, like Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse Five. I remember the first time I read Slaughterhouse Five, it amazed me and surprised me. One...

Just wandering around on you tube and discovered an apple (uk) ad targeting parental controls, with the 'naughty step'. The Mac says something about blocking items being "isn't that what kids want to do?". The idea behind parental controls is to block...

Here is a conversion of the WPCEvents.h file that is used with the vista SDK to get the parts of the various crimson events converted into c#. I have written about this file before and how the parts are connected together and how all the numbers work...

The log viewer in Parental Controls reads in the public available system logs and turns them into the data you can see in the control panel. The logs are brought in from a couple of places, the System logs, the Application logs and the Parental controls...

Looks like Bill Gates is using parental controls for his children these days, nice to see that people within the company are buying off and using the technology as well. We have had a surprisingly small amount of negative press on the parental controls...

This is a nifty site with an interesting story .

We have had a lot of good press coverage from Parental Controls over the past few days, which has been great. Bill Gates and various other people have been pressing it as one of the main reasons to upgrade to Vista, I think it is a very good reason to...

For a game to show up in Parental Controls as being run a few things need to happen. First the game must have a GDF file so it will be properly registered with the Game Explorer. Once the game is correctly registered with the Game Explorer it will show...

There have been some comments about various aspects of Parental Controls being overwhelming, specifically in this post . It is true that some of the existing parental control companies will not be so keen on some features, however there is a lot of area...

Short summary of Windows parental control features: Game Restrictions – ability to restrict games based on ratings and on descriptors associated with the game. These are based on ESRB ratings, and other rating systems from other countries. Application...

To make Windows Parental Controls work better with browsers and other programs that support http, the filter in vista sends back a custom error number when the page is blocked. This number is 450, an app can recognise this error code and display a blocked...

It is possible to open up the windows parental controls control panel from the command line, well any control panel. You pass in the name of the control panel to open up and it opens it up. Nice and easy. For the parental controls panel the syntax is...

There are 4 different exclusion lists in Windows Parental Controls that are used to control which programs and which urls are allowed to be connected to. The two main lists are the HttpExemptionList and the UrlExemptionList, these are modifiable lists...

It is possible to turn on parental controls if your machine is on a domain, but default it is disabled. It is not possible to turn on parental controls for Business skews of Vista since parental controls is not present on the machine at all in these skews...

The system contains a list of applications which are exempted from parental controls. This list can be accessed via WMI and it should be modified in the install process for any application that requires free Internet access. The way to do this is to access...

If you are using a multiview in asp to display a bunch of different pieces of information, for example if you are displaying a bunch of logs that are selectable inside your multiview (using the tabbed control I posted here recently), you need to be careful...

The GDF file is an xml file associated with games in vista. The file gives information about the various ratings associated with the game along with the name of the game. The XML file format is fairly simple and is as follows: <GameDefinitionFile>...

It is possible to see exceptions passed back in the messages sent to the service. This makes it a lot easier to debug multi-peer applications. The way to do this is to add into the web.config file the section. You can see in the following config section...

This is a piece of code to deal with tabbed browing, it uses a CompositeControl to deal with creating the tabs and the views. The tabs are created using a simple table setup with the different td elements using different css classes to change the way...

I was looking around at ways to optimise asp.net over the last few days and ran across this article about using ROW_NUMBER(), which is quite good. There were a few aspects of it missing that I had to do a little more work to look up. I tracked down some...

Getting the file description in C# requires using the VerQueryInfo calls to load in the data from the file. First you load in the culture information so you get the information in the right language and then you load the actual data into the buffer. To...

The WPC event system logs a series of events to the WPC crimson channel. The channel contents is viewable inside the log viewer and it has a path of: Microsoft-Windows-ParentalControls/Operational. The events are logged with a variety of different parameters...