IBrowse Index
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Thumbnail Extractor feature in .NET Developer's JournalThis article in the .NET Developer's Journal reuses the Thumbnail Extractor code to create a thumbnail viewer control in .NET. Last Updated: 22 May 2004 |
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MSDN Articles on Managed Code PerformanceThese four articles on managed code performance in the .NET Framework provide useful and interesting reading. Two also provide an excellent code profiler utility that shows you exactly what's happening as your application runs, and describe in detail some of the things you want to consider when coding the application, as well as evaluating the performance overhead of many standard operations with some benchmark timings. Last Updated: 23 January 2004 |
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Controlling an LCD or VFD with the Parallel Port in .NETExcellent idea, nice article. C# code demonstrating how to control a 2 line 32 character LCD display directly from a PC's parallel port (if you still have one...) Now, give me a blue backlight display and I want one on my machine too. The code would be easy to adapt to other languages too. Last Updated: 23 January 2004 |
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Sony Vaio X505 - Can I Have One PleaseWhat my parents and relatives were thinking of at Christmas when they bought me socks and stuff I don't know, when the obvious gift was available all along. Carbon fibre, 9.7mm thick at the front to 2cm at the back, 825g, 1GHz Centrino with i855GM chipset, 512Mb RAM, extraordinarily expensive... this is what laptops should be like (although apparently the battery life isn't all that). Last Updated: 21 January 2004 |
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Sort everything with Polymorphism by (VB2TheMax, Francesco Balena)Now this is a bit of fun. You can use CallWindowProc to call any function provided it has the same arguments as a WindowProc function (four long parameters and one return long). That means that any function you can call AddressOf on in VB that meets this template can be used as a callback. The article describes this technique and demonstrates using it to create a polymorphic Shell Sort. Last Updated: 7 November 2003 |
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LongHorn SDK Preview SiteGenerating a fair amount of controversy on its message boards, Microsoft's future OS version promises to be an even more radical step than (say) the migration from VB to VB.NET. A new version of the Windows API (WinFX, all in Managed Code), a new graphics engine (Avalon, with a declarative XML-based programming syntax, XAML) and a new file system (WinFS) mean plenty to think about. Of course, you may be required to sell your family into slavery before you will get a licence to run anything under the proposed "Trustworthy Computing" scheme, but such is life. And "Avalon" was a rubbish song. Anyway, this site provides previews of the SDK for some of the features and programming concepts, and for such an early stage it looks promising. Last Updated: 7 November 2003 |
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IDL For VB Tutorial (VB2TheMax, Philip Fucich)One of the better articles available describing Type Libraries and how they relate to VB. It describes the tools you will need to use, and describes some of the IDL syntax showing how it relates to VB code. Despite the fact that it again describes the simple IDL use-case of creating an interface which you can implement in VB (something which of course you can also do rather more simply by writing the Inteface in VB itself and then compiling it), it goes a bit further and provides some pointers which will be handy if you're trying to convert COM API interfaces for use with VB (or even .NET). Last Updated: 7 November 2003 |
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Catching Events of Dynamically Added Control Arrays (VB2TheMax, Christian Landesberger)Christian certainly has some "bunnies in his hat" in this article, which usefully shows that it is just about possible to dynamically add an array of controls and respond to their events. However, it also demonstrates two things: firstly, the technique only works if you know which events and type of control you wish to respond to; and secondly whoever added this feature to VB6 must have been drinking the bong water, as it is so transparently useless to have a feature to dynamically add a control without any way of generically receiving its events. More realistically, Edanmo's ConnectionPoint collection provides the type of functionality you need to achieve this. Last Updated: 7 November 2003 |
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Comparison of Sorting Algorithms (VB2TheMax, David B Ring)Excellent: very useful article which provides implementations of 9 different sorting algorithms in VBA and compares speed and memory consumption of each. Unusually, MSD RadixSort and Ternary QuickSort algorithms are included, and they work too. Quick sort is still probably the general purpose sort of choice. Last Updated: 7 November 2003 |
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MSDN Magazine: Detect and Plug GDI LeaksA more in-depth look at tracing GDI resources that my own simple GUI Resource Tracer. This article demonstrates not just how to determine which types of GDI resources are being used rather than a total (showing counts of brushes, pens, bitmaps etc separately) it also demonstrates how to install a local override for all GDI calls, thus enabling them to be instrumented. As as side effect, you can also hook into other processes on the system and examine the GDI objects they have in memory. Very interesting! For some reason the download contains all the symbolic debug files, meaning it is about 13Mb - the actual executable code is much smaller. Last Updated: 8 June 2003 |
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