GodMode in 7

One of the mild irritants of Windows 7 is that the Control Panel is kinda fragmented with multiple folders and stuff, but no readily apparent means of seeing everything in one go...

Well, news is out on the Interwebs of Windows 7 GodMode, which gives you a single folder view of the various Control Panel options.

To do this, all you need to do is create a Folder, anywhere you please, and give it this exact name (copy and paste):

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

The folder itself is displayed simply as GodMode (I'd have been unimpressed if it had displayed the rather impenetrable extension), and at least Works For Me™.

That Quiet Professionalism

Nothing is quite as suave as only realising that you've dribbled toothpaste down your jumper after you've sat down at your desk in the office.

xsd.exe and the xs:import element

I have spent a largely unprofitable hour trying to work out why xsd.exe couldn't parse a specific .xsd file I was presenting it with.

If, for example, the parent .xsd has a namespace reference of

    ...xmlns:sf="http://slowfox.dreamwidth.org/"...

followed by an import element

    <xs:import namespace="http://slowfox.dreamwidth.org/" schemaLocation="SlowFox.xsd"/>

then when running the xsd tool from the Visual Studio command prompt, you get the following error message:

Warning: Schema could not be validated. Class generation may fail or may produce incorrect results.

The answer, which I learnt courtesy of Scott Hanselman's blog is to provide all the dependent files on the command line, in addition to the parent .xsd.

So you'd run

xsd.exe /c MainSchemaDefinition.xsd SlowFox.xsd

which produces the desired result (C# classes generated automagically from the .xsd).

The issue, apparently, is that the xsd tool can't handle the xs:import element (despite the fact that you've given it an exact file name to match against the specified namespace), but if you provide all the consituent files as part of the command's argument, xsd.exe knows where to try and look for the various dependencies it stumbles across.

We said it was snowy

*HUGE* pic alert, courtesy of NASA - Satellite photo of the UK, under snow.

Be warned, it's rather large.