AddressOf.com : Windows Forms, Tools

Why?

CorySmith — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 15:17:00 GMT

Why aren't there any decent audio libraries for .NET? Don't get me wrong, it's nice that the framework supports some audio features in a very simple way if you want to just play something. However, if you need access to the audio data to manipulate it in whatever way or just want to know the duration, play location, audio levels, etc... why is it so difficult? To add, there are now nearly a handful of audio sub-systems to choose from... Windows Multimedia, Asio, DirectSound and the new audio subsystem included with Windows Vista / Windows 7. It seems that if you want to play in the world of audio, you really have to get your hands very dirty by digging at full depth into API land.

Oh well, guess it's time to get my hands dirty. ;-)

Adventures in Windows Vista (x64) - Part 2

CorySmith — Thu, 24 May 2007 13:27:00 GMT

After running Vista x64 on another machine for a few days; installing various pieces of critical software and seeing that everything seemed to be working smoothly... I've made the full leap on my main desktop machine (the one that now has 4GB of memory).

Some interesting "facts":

Windows Experience Index reports my processor running at a 5.0 (was 4.9 in 32-bit).
Memory running at a 4.8 (was 4.6 in 32-bit).
I have 66% of my memory free while running Outlook, Visual Studio 2005, SmartFTP, a few instances of Internet Explorer, several gadgets, Xfire and SQL Server Management.
Windows Vista had *ALL* drivers available from Microsoft upon installation completion. Yes, this includes my scanner, printer and even the nVidia 8800 video card (which wasn't available January 30th for 32-bit, so it looks like it was added).
Lord of the Rings Online no longer pegs the memory meter when I have *everything* maxed out for the graphics option... thus no more thrashing the drive while playing and everything is beautiful!

Out Of The Box Experience

So the out of the box experience for installation has been pretty good thus far. Just in case, I do have 32-bit still available to me by rebooting, selecting the boot drive in the BIOS. In order to handle swapping versions, I've got 3 physical drives in the machine... the original drive, a "data" drive and a 10,000rpm drive running the x64 version of Vista. Windows Vista includes a pretty interesting new feature where you can go into your user folder, right click on a folder in there such as Pictures, click properties. Once you have the properties dialog visible, select the Location tab. At this point, you can have the folder located wherever you wish. What I've done is put various folders (Downloads, Pictures, Music, Videos, etc.) on the "data" drive (D:\). I've done this for both the 64-bit and 32-bit instances... so when I switch, all my "data" is still available.

Eventually I see me 100% on Vista x64; but just in case something comes up I can switch and still get work done.

Software Compatibility

Regarding software. So far so good. Experience has been that anything that runs on Windows Vista 32-bit seems to work (for the most part) on x64. I have had a few weird glitches such as:

Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach - upon exiting the game, I get a dndclient.exe has stopped working generic error. Of course, I'm sending the error report, hopefully it will get resolved automagically.
Whatever the issue is with DDO, Lord of the Rings Online experiences the same problem... So Turbine (the developers) needs to fix it in two places.
Launching Windows Media Player and Windows Movie Maker for the first time gave me some COM registration errors. However, everything seems to work just fine as all my music, streaming video and local video plays (or edits in the case of video) just fine.

Multiplicity Update

An update regarding the Multiplicity issue I encountered in the previous post - this was operator error. It's been so long since I've installed Multiplicity, that I didn't realize that the Copy/Paste feature was optional and turned off by default. Turning it on, all works as expected.

Software Development "Issues"

More updates on the developer side of things. I needed to update my Movie Jukebox software to recompile as a 32-bit application since it appears that Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition doesn't work in 64-bit mode. Strange.

Summary

All in all, so far the experience of moving to Windows Vista 64-bit is, thus far, a lot less problematic than moving from Windows 95/98 to Windows NT 4.0. I'll keep you posted...

It's 2:12am and I'm done with a new VS2005 Macro hack

CorySmith — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 05:13:00 GMT

I need to run it through it's paces, but I now have a VS2005 macro that will, whenever I successfully build a release mode project, package the project folder into a zip file named [ProjectName]_src_v[OutputAssemblyFileVersion].zip. And it doesn't require anything additional to be installed on the machine. And it's not using the zip functionality from the J# libraries either. This thing is all about leveraging the zip functionality that is built into Windows XP and above. So it's down to being Windows Vista (that's what I run) + Visual Studio 2005 + a macro (cut-n-paste it into the Macros IDE).

I'm going to run it for a few days to make sure it appears pretty stable and then make it available along with a short article explaining the processes that are taking place to accomplish what should be such a simple task. ;-)

Living in a Land of Obfuscation

CorySmith — Mon, 08 May 2006 10:57:00 GMT

You know, I'm all for making some things available for free; but at the same time want to protect my “property” as much as possible. With great tools such as Reflector being available; you really need to consider using obfuscation to at least make it a little more difficult to reverse engineer your code. In addition, most professional obfuscators offer the ability to encrypt embedded strings; which allows for an added level of “security”. I quote security since it's nearly impossible to 100% protect anything; all obfuscation does is raise the level of entry to reverse engineer and modify the value proposition for doing so.

OK, so it's important to obfuscate. What kind of problems are you going to run into doing so?

Well, one of the biggest negatives is that you lose some of the *HUGE* benefits of reflection and debugging. If your code is not obfuscated and an error occurs; it's really simple to see where the error occured thus allowing you to quickly identify the problem and get it resolved. If all the class/method names are jumbled, you lose this benefit.

What else is there?

If you are utilizing serialization (and you might be and not even know it), you have to make sure that these classes/methods are not obfuscated (renamed); otherwise every time you compile and obfuscate, you could have newer names. Even if you were using an obfuscator that could remember the names from one compile to another; your resulting xml file (or whatever target) would contain these jumbled names and not the original... removing one of the benefits of XML in the first place... human readability.

Is there anything else?

Yes. Depending on the tool you are using, you might not have an integrated development experience within Visual Studio. If you are lucky enough to have one that is integrated, you might experience bugs introduced by the manufacturer of the obfuscation tool that causes “other errors” such as not being able to add Web References. I experienced this with a previous version of Dotfuscator and after chasing my tail in circles for a while, one of the things I tried caused Dotfuscator to notify me that there was a newer version available. When I uninstalled the previous version getting ready to install the newer one (why I had to do this with such an expensive product is beyond me, but...); I figured I'd try the add web reference problem. Sure enough, it was fixed. Installing the newer version didn't break it either, so now I'm golden.

Surely there is more...

Of course there's more. ClickOnce.

ClickOnce and Obfuscation don't have a great story at this stage of the game. Visual Studio makes it really simple to utilize ClickOnce deployment from within the environment. However, you can't integrated obfuscation as part of this process. So if you want to use obfuscation, you aren't able to use the integrated tool. :-(

However, all is not lost. There's a tool called MageUI. This tool allows you to modify the manifest files associated with ClickOnce. It's a manual process, but not too difficult to deal with once you get it initially setup. I'll post a follow up on how to use MageUI.exe.

Visual Favorites - Early Alpha Build

CorySmith — Sat, 03 Jul 2004 04:51:00 GMT

I've got a very early alpha build of the Visual Favorites application I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. I've been real busy working on a lot of things, so this got a little neglected. Spent last night and tonight getting it polished up a bit for the features that are currently active.

Currently, it:

Drag and Drop favorites between folders.
Automatically downloads favicon.ico icons if they are specified in the favorites file. These are cached for future reference.
Modify the name of a favorite.
Contains a simplified browser to assist you in managing your favorites.
Browser allows you to go forward/back, stop, refresh, go home, and enter a url to browse to.
When on a page, you can easily add an item to your favorites under the currently selected folder.
Alt+F1 will toggle the folder view pane for more browser real estate.

That's about it for now. Right now, it's sort of a mesh of various features that you can already do today as separate components. Still have a long way to go before it's where I'd like to see it. If you have any suggestions for what you'd like to see added, please don't hesitate to say so.

If you feel a little brave (actually, it's been pretty well tested in it's current state), you can download the first alpha here (Note: you must extract *all* of the files to the same folder to run).

VisualFavorites - A teaser screen capture.

CorySmith — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 04:24:00 GMT

The main menu and toolbars aren't completed just yet (more of a placeholder), worked on getting the general layout (which is all resizable) complete. Also got all the folder editing (new, rename, delete) via context menu and now include drag 'n drop folder moving. The treeview drag 'n drop emulates the behavior of Windows Explorer and Outlook 2003 (the folders highlight as you drag the cursor over them). The favorites list has also gained a context menu for open, rename and delete.

[update] added a link to a full size image.

New VB.NET sample application coming soon...

CorySmith — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 08:17:00 GMT

I'm now working on a utilitarian type application that will allow you to manage your Internet Explorer favorites in a much better way. Well, at least in a way that I find 'better'. ;-) I've been toying with this idea for a while and now it's begun.

Since there are a ton of these types of applications that exist today out in the wild, there's not really any reason to do anything serious with this application so I'm going to be making it available to everyone at no cost. I wasn't impressed with the free ones available and the ones that cost money just didn't seem to have enough in them to justify the costs. Will what I'm working on be as good as what is already available, don't know. I just started on it tonight and have gotten pretty far already; so who knows what this utility will grow into.

Basically, I'm setting it up in a three pane layout (similar to the Outlook 2003 layout) where the first pane is the folders, second pane is the favorites in that folder and the third pane being a embedded browser. This way you can click on a favorite, see the page and decide what the favorite should really be called and what folder it should go in. Drag and drop is enabled to move the favorites into other folders. Context menus are available that allow you to add/remove/rename folders and remove/rename favorites.

As it is now, I save favorites to my desktop. Then, it gets so cluttered, I end up copying all of them to some other folder (usually called Stuff). Then, at some point that folder gets copied yet some other place and eventually I have favorites that I meant to get back to and can't remember where they all were. The folders feature in IE is a good idea, but it's not real conducive to browsing quickly. Basically, I'm wanting an application that allows me to dump bookmarks into and quickly be able to find something that I bookmarked when I get a chance to get back to whatever it was (which may be several months later). So obviously, future additions will included some sort of search mechanism, possibly a caching mechanism to allow deep searches of the html and I'm toying with the idea of leveraging a web service so that you can use the application on multiple computers (home and office) and have access to all your favorites.

From a development point of view, some of the principles going into this application will include drag and drop within treeview nodes and listview items (also within the application and cross application with IE and Windows Explorer), Docking and Anchoring, Context Menus... what else will be included, not really sure at this point (there will be a lot more, including the possibility of some Patterns & Practices). Most of these will probably be seperated out into various articles showing how to accomplish the same tasks.

Let me know if your interested in this and what other types of coding sample(s) you might be interested in seeing demonstrated.

Obfuscation Tip of the Day - Embedded Resources

CorySmith — Tue, 18 May 2004 04:45:00 GMT

When loading embedded resources like bitmaps and icons from your assembly, such as using the following method as described by Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET (Chris Sells & Justin Gehtland):

NotifyIcon1.Icon = New Icon(Me.GetType, "graphic.ico")

It sure seems straight forward enough. It looks a whole lot simpler than the following method:

NotifyIcon1.Icon = New Icon(System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetManifestResourceStream("WindowsApplication1.graphic.ico"))

So, when I saw this while reading through (what is, by the way, one of the best books I've read on Windows Forms development in .NET), I though that I would switch all instances in my code where I'm using the second method with the newly discovered one. Testing the code in debug mode (which I don't obfuscate) worked without any issues whatsoever. However, once I got ready to debug in Release mode (which is obviously obfuscated), problems started rearing their ugly head. To make matters even worse, one of my components (which is specific to this assembly) also had embedding graphics. Because the OnPaint method was trying to loaded embedded graphics... it apparently caused the component not to be loadable in the designer (while in Release mode) and decided to just conveniently remove itself from the designer. Not to bad in and of itself, however, because I'm using an interesting combination of docking and anchoring, it caused a few headaches.

So, although the newly discovered mechanism looked much more efficient and easier to use; the original one works when you obfuscate the assembly, while the new one definitely fails most miserably.