Useful Freeware

Make edits in your pdf files with PDF Exchange Viewer

PDF Exchange Viewer is a fast and lightweight pdf reader. Don’t let the name fool you – it allows you to do some editing, which makes it very valuable tool. Here are some important features at a glance:

• Allows you to add callouts, text fields, highlighting, drawing different shapes, sticky notes, arrows, etc. in a .pdf file
• You can neatly overlay text, which is very useful trying to fill a scanned form
• Deleting, Rotating and Cropping pages is also a worthy feature.

All edits you do are later visible in Adobe Acrobat Reader, so annotating and exchanging notes is easy. All things considered I think it is a very nice addition to your freeware collection.

Use Kaxaml instead of the XAMLPad

Kaxaml is a nice looking lightweight XAML editor, which features intellisense and live preview of your XAML files. It offers a split view, similar to XAMLPad, included in the Windows SDK. It igves you a chance to play with XAML without downloading the SDK, although for anything serious I would use you Visual Studio. Here is a screenshot to spice your appetite:

How to make applications look better on high DPI setting

A problem I just struggled with on Windows Vista and Visual Studio 2008 on a 120 dpi setting. The problem is that Visual Studio looked really bad by default on a high DPI setting. The solution to the problem is to go to the Visual Studio shortcut and go to Properties > Compatibility and check “Disable display scaling on high DPI settings” (see screenshot below). Other non-high DPI aware programs like Total Commander also suffer from the same problem.