My name is

David Cumps

Freelance software engineer

A passionate geek, always curious, always learning.

A batch file that looked empty in Notepad led to a way to create invisible text, and the question why Notepad saves and opens differently.

Turning any bitmap into a non-rectangular Windows Form in C#: build a Region from every non-transparent pixel.

Getting on IRC with C#: a console bot that connects, logs in, joins a channel and reacts to server and user commands.

Most posts here assume a lot of background, so I asked fellow students for their C# questions and answered them with basic examples.

My own Longhorn pre-alpha screenshots: the desktop, Ctrl-Alt-Del, IE's new Clear Browsing Records and Visual Studio Whidbey.

Trying irregular, skewed controls in Longhorn's XAML: gradients worked, but a skewed ListBox rendered stray lines.

Longhorn finally installed on my laptop: tweaks, Whidbey BSODs, a first XAML file, and a Download Manager you can't stop.

A Belgian party argued for Linux in government because PCs would last longer; my 2004 take on why their arguments didn't hold up.

The Longhorn pre-alpha setup kept failing at 13 minutes left with 'An error occurred while copying files', on my laptop and in Virtual PC alike.