September 2003 - Posts

For various reasons, I end up doing a lot of Image Manipulation in my various programs (Mainly scaling, mind you) and I have to say how much I like System.Drawing. I'm currently polishing off a Solitare program, and adding the ability to customize cards & the background of the playing field, and after a little judicious refactoring, it took about 20 lines of code to load, scale, update, and draw the new images. With no real noticable difference in drawing speed. Great!

My only real complaint is that you can convert a bmp to an icon (at least, I can't) and it can take ungodly amounts of memory depending on the size of the image (I have a program that can put separate images on a multi-monitor system, and it takes something like 100+MB to create a 3 monitor image. Yikes!) Fortunately, it can release that memory as soon as it's done, but still!

So what I've learned this week, is that no matter how great the code, and no matter how extensive the backup plan, if you don't have a generator or a backup server in another state, your offline till the lights come on. We were down from 10:00am Thur to 8:00pm Saturday (at home) and I've been suffering withdrawl, and we are still down at the office, so I might be coding offline for a few days.
More Posts