Windows has a pretty capable SpeechRecognition engine built-in via Windows Media services. In .NET these features are accessible via the Windows SDK (WinSdk) that expose these Windows features to .NET applications. In this post I discuss how you can integrate these features into a WPF application, and discuss some of the pitfalls along the way that you have to watch out for related to the SDK integration 'features'.

A discussion of how to show readonly controls in user interface and ensuring that they are not UI activated. This post discusses readonly and disabled behavior and how you can make readonly behave better if you choose to use it over disabled.

Windows has support for an `ms-setting:` Protocol Handler/Uri Scheme that allows you to directly open most Windows settings dialogs directly via simple Url based shell commands.

ASP.NET Core has support for resolving Urls in Controllers and Razor Pages via embedded `~/` links in Views and via `Url.Content()`. But, these features are tied to Controllers or Razor Pages - what if you need to resolve Urls elsewhere, in middleware or even inside of business logic? In this post I describe how you can build a couple of helpers that are more flexible and also provide some additional functionality of resolving site root and relative paths to full site root paths.