Creating long running Windows Forms applications without a start-up form
Sometimes you may wish to create an application that sits running in the background but doesn't actually display an initial user interface. However, the user can interact with the application and so...
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Downloading new and changed Azure storage blobs at scheduled intervals
BackgroundI recently finished moving our Lumitix server from Amazon's EC2 into a hybrid of an Azure Web Role and Azure Blob Storage, and a local machine. It's been running for a couple of weeks now...
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Getting the hWnd of the edit component within a ComboBox control
I'm currently in the process of dusting off the bugs from a tool written back in 2011. One of the bugs involves an editable ComboBox control paired with a separate Button control. When the button is...
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Visual Studio Extension for adding multiple projects to a solution
BackgroundMy solutions have lots of references to other projects, either common libraries or unit testing libraries. Neither of these scenarios lend well to manual binary references or NuGet packages,...
View ArticleCyotek Add Projects Extension updated for Visual Studio 2013 RTM
In my last post I introduced Cyotek Add Projects, a simple extension for Visual Studio that allowed you to add multiple projects to a solution.However, I'd left the VSIX manifest version at 11.0,...
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Specifying custom text when using the LabelEdit functionality of a TreeView
Recently I was updating a support tool that displays documents in raw form and allows editing of them. This tool is centred around a TreeView, and the Text property of each TreeNode is a concatenation...
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Extending the LabelEdit functionality of a TreeView to include validation
In my last post I described how to extend the default label edit funcionality of a TreeView control to be somewhat more flexible, by allowing you to specify custom text other than blindly using the...
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How to be notified when your application is activated and deactivated
I recently had a requirement where a user was able to perform an action externally to my application, and my application then had to detect this for processing.I could of course just had a poller...
View ArticleTools we use - 2013 edition
As another year enters its final stages, I decided I would log the primary tools I use for my developer role, should be an interesting experiment to compare with each year, if I don't get distracted by...
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Loading the color palette from a BBM/LBM image file using C#
I took a break from arguing with our GIF decoder to take a quick look at the BBM format as I have a few files in that format containing colour palettes I wished to extract. When I looked into this, I...
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Reading Photoshop Color Swatch (aco) files using C#
In a previous article I described how to read the colour map from a DeluxePaint LBM/BBM file. In the next pair of articles, I'm going to describe how to load and save colour swatch files used by...
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Writing Photoshop Color Swatch (aco) files using C#
The previous article in this mini-series described how to read files in Abode's Colour File format as used by applications such as Photoshop and other drawing programs.In this second article, I'll...
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Adding drag handles to an ImageBox to allow resizing of selection regions
The ImageBox control is already a versatile little control and I use it for all sorts of tasks. One of the features I recently wanted was to allow users to be able to select a source region, then...
View ArticleColorPicker Controls 1.0.4.0 Update
The ColorPicker Controls have been updated to version 1.0.4.0.This is a fairly substantial update, with quite a few bug fixes and enhancements to the code.What's next for the library?I feel the code is...
View ArticleAdd Projects Extension - 1.0.1.0
A short and sweet post today...I've been happily using the Add Projects extension since first writing it several months ago, and I actually find it a real time saver. However, one thing that has been...
View ArticleCircularBuffer - a first-in, first-out collection of objects using a fixed...
I haven't had much time to work on blog posts recently, but I do have one quick post to make.One of our current application prototype's stores a bunch of data. Data continuously arrives, but I only...
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Batch Syntax Highlighting in the DigitalRune Text Editor Control
In a previous article I described how to create a CSS syntax highlighting definition file for use with the open source DigitalRune Text Editor Control.Today I was testing events in one of our myriad of...
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Configuring the emulation mode of an Internet Explorer WebBrowser control
Occasionally I need to embed HTML in my applications. If it is just to display some simple layout with basic interactions, I might use a component such as HtmlRenderer. In most cases however, I need a...
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Dragging items in a ListView control with visual insertion guides
I can't remember when it was I first saw something being dragged with an insertion mark for guidance. Whenever it was, it was a long long time ago and I'm just catching up now.This article describes...
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Dragging items in a ListBox control with visual insertion guides
In my last post, I described how to drag and drop items to reorder a ListView control. This time I'm going to describe the exact same technique, but this time for the more humble ListBox.Getting...
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