Archive for the_time('F Y')


23 November 2004 in General | Comments (0)

Don’t go to work with a webpage open that has a single image that refreshes every 5 seconds when you’ve close to going over cap.

150MB of traffic used to show the webcam of Rory Blyth (from .Net Rocks) on the side of his blog is not good.

- JD

Average Rating: 4.4 out of 5 based on 210 user reviews.


21 November 2004 in General | Comments (0)

I’ve been following this for a few months now. It’s an open source version of Transport Tycoon Deluxe with many advantages over the original.

If you’re a fan of Transport Tycoon Deluxe I would strongly suggest you try this out. You will need the original Windows version of Transport Tycoon for the graphics files but otherwise it’s very easy to use.

Currently they’re working on:

  • Larger maps
  • Network rewrite (almost done)
  • Possible new graphics engine
  • Completely new graphics set (for copyright reasons)

Site: http://www.openttd.com

– JD

Average Rating: 4.6 out of 5 based on 218 user reviews.


7 November 2004 in General | Comments (0)

The only time my parents were anti the amount of time I spent on the computer was around the summer of 1998 when I first started strapping a frozen flannel to my forehead* to help with the heat of sitting in a room that was ~30 degrees on a hot summers day while on holiday.

* I don’t do this anymore to keep cool while working on a computer, but it does occassionally help with headaches.

– JD

Average Rating: 5 out of 5 based on 150 user reviews.


6 November 2004 in General | Comments (0)

I’ve managed to get the listview drawing correctly! After using some reflection I found that some of my enumerated types weren’t working as I expected and hence certain messages weren’t being handled correctly.

Now I need to modify it so that it doesn’t simply draw thumbnails when View = View.Large and add a new View type which will enable the thumbnails.

Also found that I need to implement object caching into my datalayer as the listview is quite chatty with my objects which, at the moment, talk to the database far too much (scrolling a list of 2, 000 item used to not increment the query count, now it jumps to about 4, 000 queries off the scroll!).

I’m just stoked it’s working and look forward to adding the new features to it. Might look at sharing the component once I’ve completed the changes.

– JD

Average Rating: 4.6 out of 5 based on 264 user reviews.


6 November 2004 in .Net | Comments (0)

Over the last week I’ve been battling with converting a VB version of an ower-drawn listview to C#.

The benefits of the code I’m trying to convert is that it supports displaying thumbnails in the listview – something missing from even the .net 2.0 listview control (Note: I’m not interested in just setting the icon size to 100 or whatever and loading an imagelist and setting the listview.View.LargeIcons – that’s not efficient enough and will require all sorts of ugly hacks).

So anyway, I’ve altered the original code quite considerably and finally managed to get it somewhat working. I say somewhat working because it’s not actually displaying the thumbnails, but it’s a million miles ahead of where I was. My current problem seems to be that the dwItemSpec value that I’ve pulled from the Message gives massive numbers, like 758437504. This causes problems as that’s meant to be the index of the listview item. Obviously I don’t have close to a billion list view items, I only have 9, so it never gets to doing the custom draw due to it always thinking the current item is out of view.

I’ll keep going at it and see how I get on. The code works pefectly in VB, so I’ll build that and decompile that to see if it gives me any help.

The custom listview I’m attempting to duplicate is the one that ships with the FotoVision sample smart client application from the MSDN Smart Client site. Well worth a look at for anyone who enjoys winforms development.

- JD

Average Rating: 4.5 out of 5 based on 241 user reviews.