As babies smash on the keyboard, colored shapes, letters and numbers appear on the screen. Baby Smash will lock out the Windows Key, as well as Ctrl-Esc and Alt-Tab so your baby can’t get out of the application. Pressing ALT-F4 will exit the application and Shift-Ctrl-Alt-O brings up the options dialog. I’m always interested in your feedback as well!

I wrote BabySmash! for my 2 year old and 5 month old so they could bang on the keyboards of my Windows machines without hurting anything. It’s a copy/homage of the very fine and free AlphaBaby for the Macintosh. BabySmash is free also and the source code is available on my blog soon. Enjoy!

Baby Smash! by Scott Hanselman

With .NET things have gotten much simpler. The System.Diagnostics namespace exposes
a Process class that you can use to launch external programs. At the simplest level,
you can launch a new process with the shared Process.Start method, passing it either
the name of an executable file or a filename with an extension associated with an
executable application. For example, the following code launches the “c:somepathsomefile.txt”

 System.Diagnostics.Process.Start
_ ("c:somepathsomefile.txt") 

Launching and Monitoring
External Programs from VB.NET Applications

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb245820.aspx

This article demonstrates how to add static items and data-bound items to a DropDownList
control. The sample in this article populates a DropDownList control with an initial
item.

How
to add static items and results from data binding to a DropDownList control by using
Visual Basic .NET.

LDAP://CN=Users,DC=subdomain,DC=domain,DC=com

If you are binding to an OU, use a path like

LDAP://OU=Employees,DC=subdomain,DC=domain,DC=com

Imports System.DirectoryServices

Private Sub GetCreationDate()
Dim ContainerPath As String = “LDAP://CN=Users,DC=subdomain,DC=domain,DC=com”

Console.WriteLine(“Start”)
Dim searcher As DirectorySearcher
Dim results As SearchResultCollection
Dim searchRoot As New DirectoryEntry(ContainerPath)
Try

searcher = New DirectorySearcher(searchRoot)
searcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add(“createTimeStamp”)
searcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add(“cn”)
searcher.Filter = “(&(objectClass=user)(objectCategory=person))”

results = searcher.FindAll

Console.WriteLine(“Users
Found: “ & results.Count)

‘
These two variables will hold the values found

Dim createTime As String = “”

Dim cname As String = “”

‘
Loop through each entry in the result collection and

‘
write the name and createTimeStamp value

For Each result As SearchResult In results
‘
Get the value currently stored for createTimeStamp

createTime = result.Properties(“createTimeStamp”)(0)

‘
Get the value currently stored for name

cname = result.Properties(“cn”).Item(0).ToString

Console.WriteLine(cname.PadLeft(40) & ControlChars.Tab &
createTime.PadLeft(12))
Next

Console.WriteLine(“Complete”)
Console.ReadLine()
Catch ex As Exception
Console.WriteLine(“Error:
“ & ex.Message)
End Try

End Sub

Dim searcher As DirectorySearcher
Dim results As SearchResultCollection
Dim searchRoot As New DirectoryEntry(“LDAP://CN=Users,DC=mytest,DC=whitworth,DC=org”)
searcher = New DirectorySearcher(searchRoot)
searcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add(“telephoneNumber”)
searcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add(“cn”)
searcher.Filter = “(&(objectClass=user)(objectCategory=person))”

results = searcher.FindAll

dim result as SearchResult
dim entryName as string = “”

dim entryTelephone as string = “”

for each result in results
entryName = result.properties(“cn”)(0).tostring

If Not result.Properties(“telephoneNumber”).Count = 0 then

entryTelephone = result.properties(“telephoneNumber”)(0).tostring
else

entryTelephone = “Empty”

end if

debug.writeline(entryName & vbTab & entryTelephone)
next

debug.writeline(“Complete”)