As we’ve seen, Windows vista has a whole revamped taskbar. Windows Vista, still follows the old kind of taskbar which we’ve been seeing since the initial version of Windows. Because of this reason, lot of people are not comfortable using the new taskbar. Or some guys are not ready to accept the changes. So for them, here’s tip to change Windows 7 taskbar similar to Windows Vista. But functionally it’s not really similar to windows Vista, it’s ‘almost a replica’ of it.

What you’re seeing above is an original Windows 7 taskbar. Windows provides ways to modify it’s appearance.

Right Click on taskbar->Properties. From the appearing dialog, chose “User Small Icons” (it’s again according to your convenience). The also opt for “Combine when toolbar is full” option from Toolbar buttons combo. See the image below.

The resultant taskbar may appear as follows

Thanks Tim Sneath for his great tips

It’s often necessary to extract the directory path from a whole file path. Path Handling functions are truly handy by providing lot of path related helper functions.

You can use PathRemoveFileSpec function to do this. Here’s modified version of the original sample provided at msdn website.

[sourcecode language='cpp']
#include
#include “Shlwapi.h”

#pragma comment (lib, “shlwapi.lib” )

using namespace std;

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
// Path to include file spec.
TCHAR buffer_1[] = _T( “C:\\TEST\\sample.txt” );

// Print the path with the file spec.
_tprintf( _T( “The path with file spec is : %s \n” ) ,buffer_1 );

// Call to “PathRemoveFileSpec”. This will modify the original buffer
PathRemoveFileSpec(buffer_1);

// Print the path without the file spec.
_tprintf( _T( “\nThe path without file spec is : %s \n” ) , buffer_1 );
return 0;
}
[/sourcecode]

Beautiful Teams is finally on its way to the printer!

The book is a collection of stories from top industry leaders, talking about great teams. Most of us thinking and dreaming about working with the best teams where you can give your best contributions. In the history of Software development, we heard about big falls just because they had a crap team. Even you can see it around in your organization itself.

What’s it like to work on a great software development team facing an impossible problem? How do you build an effective team? Beautiful Teams takes you behind the scenes with some of the most interesting teams in software engineering history. You’ll learn from veteran team leaders’ successes and failures, told through a series of engaging personal stories — and interviews — by leading programmers, architects, project managers, and thought leaders.

The book is soon to be released from O’Reilly, edited by Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene

Following Gurus were contributed for this book..

• Tim O’Reilly
• Scott Berkun
• Mark Healey
• Bill DiPierre
• Andy Lester
• Keoki Andrus
• Tom Tarka
• Auke Jilderda
• Grady Booch
• Jennifer Greene
• Mike Cohn
• Cory Doctorow
• Neil Siegel
• Trevor Field
• James Grenning
• Steve McConnell
• Barry Boehm and Maria H. Penedo
• Peter Gluck
• Karl E. Wiegers
• Alex Martelli
• Karl Fogel
• Michael Collins
• Karl Rehmer
• Andrew Stellman
• Ned Robinson
• Scott Ambler
• Johanna Rothman
• Mark Denovich and Eric Renkey
• Patricia Ensworth
• Andy Oram
• Tony Visconti

You can pre-order the book now at amazon.com. Yeap I’m thrilled to grab a copy

See following links for more info

BUILDING BETTER SOFTWARE

Beautiful Teams – Inspiring and Cautionary Tales from Veteran Team Leaders

Scott Berkun’s Blog