One thing I dislike in my current Vista installation is how it behaves while trying to unmount USB harddrive. I have a 320 gig external drive, which serves as a storage for my backups, torrents and videos. Also I store and run different virtual machines from it.

This morning I was about to go to the office. I shut down µTorrent and clicked “Safely remove” on my drive. “This disk cannot be removed right now. I don’t know who uses it, but someone surely is.” was the response. I tried again. The same result. Hmm, maybe some program or explorer window is indeed hanging around. I double-checked all icons on a taskbar, then running processes in Task Manager. Nothing.

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Problems with formatting

The “official” way to format strings in .NET BCL is to use String.Format method (and wrappers for it, like Console.Write).

This is not very reliable method. You can forget to include parameter into the format string or confuse one parameter with another. And your IDE does not offer any help here. (more…)