The holiday season has begun at home, preceded quite a bit by its start in the stores. (Stores very nearly skipped Halloween this year and went straight to Christmas, didn’t they?)

First, we got a wreath for our door from a local door-to-door salesgirl. This is important in two respects: First, I’ve never had a wreath before, and while it sounds sort of cliché, it’s nice and sort of makes me feel like “a real homeowner” (even though we’ve been at the same place for years now). Second, if your kid gets off their ass and actually does the door-to-door sales for their organization, I’ll most likely buy something; if you take the sign-up sheet to work and stick it on the break area table and expect me to register… well, good luck with that. Hard work gets rewarded.

2009 Trans-Siberian Orchestra

Second, we went to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert on Sunday. Not the first time we’ve seen them, but a brilliant show. Everything with TSO is always larger-than-life. Every number is huge and that just makes it full of awesome. We were in the tenth row, center section on the aisle

• perfect seats. I snuck a few pictures toward the end with my crappy Blackberry camera. Epic stuff. I’d totally go again.

This week is Thanksgiving and I totally can’t stand turkey, nor am I really big on attempting to coordinate a bajillion disparate schedules to make sure everyone gets their “face time” in, which makes it my least favorite holiday all year. (I think it’d be more important to get together with people if we all didn’t live within 45 minutes of each other and see each other all the time.)

But I’m not going to let that drag me down. I’ve got this free-standing two-foot-tall green M&M in a Santa hat to stick by our front door and I’ve been waiting to put her out. Onward to the holidays!

I use log4net for logging in various applications, but every time I start a new app I forget this and it never quite comes up in Google for me, so here we go.

Most of the examples on the log4net site showing configuration shows it right in the App.config/Web.config file for the application. That’s a painful way to go if you have, say, a single log4net.config that you want used in several projects or if you otherwise want to stick log4net.config somewhere else.

The magic bit that at least I can’t easily find and always forget is:

If you add an appSettings key called “log4net.Config” you can put an app-relative path to an external log4net.config file in there and everything will automatically configure itself using that.

It looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
  <appSettings>
    <add key="log4net.Config" value="log4net.config" />
  </appSettings>
</configuration>

That example puts the log4net.config file right in the root of the application. You could specify “config/log4net.config” to put it in a “config” subfolder, too, for example. You don’t even have to call the XmlConfigurator.Configure method or mark your assembly with an XmlConfiguratorAttribute or anything. Magic happens. It just works.

This is specifically for the default “log4net-default-repository” repository. If you’re doing something fancy with different repositories, YMMV. I’ve not tried that.

For folks interested in spelunking, this is a hardcoded setting that takes effect in the private log4net.Core.DefaultRepositorySelector.ConfigureRepository(Assembly, ILoggerRepository) method which gets called from the public log4net.Core.DefaultRepositorySelector.CreateRepository(Assembly, Type, String, Boolean) method.

In both Vista and Windows 7, when running at full 1920 x 1080 resolution, I found that I would occasionally see a one or two pixel “line” along the right side of my TV when playing video. It looked like some sort of artifact left from the menu I was just using to select the video, but I couldn’t tell. I started down the road of trying to figure out if I needed to tweak some overscan setting or something when I posted to The Green Button forums to see if anyone else saw this.

Turns out there’s a hotfix for this specific issue.

KB 974324: “Black and white pixels unexpectedly appear on the right side of the screen when you run Windows Media Center in full-screen mode in Windows 7 or in Windows Vista.”

Downloaded and installed the hotfix, problem solved. If you’re seeing this problem, grab the hotfix.

A long time ago I posted a little sample showing how to get context menus working with your DXCore plugin. As part of a new plugin I’m working on, I wanted to get an icon to show up in the context menu next to my entry in the menu, something like the icon you see for the Refactor! menu.

It’s possible, but it’s not really documented, so here’s what you do.

First, make sure you’re working with a DevExpress.CodeRush.Menus.IMenuButton. This is the type of thing you can click on and have something happen, as opposed to a DevExpress.CodeRush.Menus.IMenuPopup which is what allows you to have nested menus (like if you hover over it another context menu will fly out). The IMenuButton can have an icon, the IMenuPopup can’t.

Now make two 32 x 32 bitmap images. The first is going to be the icon you want to display. The second is the transparency mask so the menu knows what to show and what to hide. The color image will look like this:

Note that in your transparency mask, black pixels are the parts of the image I want shown and the white pixels are parts you want to be transparent.

To make it easy, I used the Visual Studio icon editor. You could do this in your favorite paint program or whatever, but I’m lazy. This has the added benefit of embedding the icons as resources (which, again, you could do after creating these in a paint program).

Once you have your icon and your transparency mask, you can create your button, set the style to show both the icon and the caption (text), then call SetFace()` to set the “Face” property to be the color icon and the “Mask” to be the transparency mask. It’ll look something like this:

MenuBar editorContextMenu = DevExpress.CodeRush.VSCore.Manager.Menus.Bars[VsCommonBar.EditorContext];
var contextMenuButton = editorContextMenu.AddButton();
contextMenuButton.Style = ButtonStyle.IconAndCaption;
contextMenuButton.SetFace(
  Properties.Resources.ContextButtonIcon.ToBitmap(),     Properties.Resources.ContextButtonIconMask.ToBitmap());
  // ...and set other properties, too:
  // * Caption
  // * Enabled
  // * Click event handler
  // * etc.

Note the “ToBitmap()” call I have there - that’s because the “Face” and “Mask” properties take bitmaps but I used the icon editor so the format needs to be transformed into a bitmap from an icon. If you embed a bitmap directly, you won’t have to do anything additional.

Once you have that, your button should have the proper icon with transparency in the context menu. Done!

UPDATE 3/4/2010: Rather than setting “Face” and “Mask” separately, use the “SetFace” method. Setting the properties manually works in VS2008 but fails in VS2010; using “SetFace” works in both.

In researching potential video formats for switching my DVD library from VIDEO_TS to something else (due to file access time issues) I found I had real trouble locating the list of audio and video formats that Windows 7 supports out of the box. The provided “supported formats” page really isn’t technical enough.

While I haven’t determined which video format to move my library to, I did get a response to my question about this on the forums. Here’s the info from there, for your convenience:

Or, split/arranged a different way: