The .NET framework uses GDI+ for the System.Drawing namespace, and this namespace has a whole new way of drawing text. Rather than using the venerable TextOut and ExtTextOut functions, there’s Graphics.DrawString() and Graphics.MeasureString(). The problem with these is that text kerning is measured differently – more accurately – but in a way that is often [...]
Miguel posted his summary of Mono at the PDC. It’s a good read if you’re at all interested in .NET portability. In it he says something he hears a lot of is “We are using C#, we need to be portable but we are not going to rewrite the software”. Of course Mono is never [...]
I’ve had a pretty good history of predicting whether a particular technology was going to survive the test of time or not. Building an app on an API that later becomes deprecated (or more likely, is no longer being developed) is no fun. So I started building a list of Microsoft’s new APIs so I [...]
I’ve started experimenting with Managed C++ again. I never really considered it a serious tool because generally I like the C# language better, and my previous experiments with trying to take an existing C++ app and turn it into a Managed C++ app have been painful and generally fruitless. But somewhere at the PDC, I [...]
The Java framework feels like a low level .NET framework. .NET has a lot of convenience functions that make doing common things easy, and the more I work with Java, the more I yearn for that. Today’s example: I want to load some XML and extract some text from a node. .NET code: 1234XmlDocument doc [...]
Now that XMPP is getting some attention thanks to it’s being used by Google Talk, it’s worth mentioning that if you’re thinking about creating an XMPP client using the .NET framework by using the XmlNodeReader, think again. XmlNodeReader won’t return a node until it’s read one token past the node in question, or reached the [...]
Normally when Windows is shutting down, every top level window gets asked to close, and once they’re all closed, the system can shut down.� Some applications, however, don’t exit when you close their main window – they hide the main window and leave a�NotifyIcon�icon on the system tray.� When you double-click on the tray icon, [...]