July 2008 Entries

Local const strings - do they give better performance?

I just installed Resharper 4 (www.jetbrains.com) on my dev machine, and aside from the usual hints etc, there are some new ones, most notably the way it asks to insert a const string locally, for example: private void ShowMessage() { string msg = "Hello!!"; Console.WriteLine( msg ); } ReSharper suggests should be replaced with: private void ShowMessage() { const string msg = "Hello!!"; Console.WriteLine( msg ); } Now, I've never done that in my code in the past, but, presumably there is some performance ......
Posted On Friday, July 25, 2008 3:46 PM | Comments (8)

iT4 Communities

Help iT4 Communities (http://www.it4communities.org.uk) - a Charity working in the UK that gets us IT professionals helping Charities who couldn't afford our services, by giving them (us) for free!!

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/#vote

Vote for it on the site above so it can get the funding it needs!!

(Voting ends on the 22nd of July!!)
Posted On Thursday, July 17, 2008 4:12 PM | Comments (0)

Other developers and older apps

When I first joined my current company, everyone, well - pretty much everyone - was complaining about an old VB6 application that was (still is) the main application in use throughout the company. I quickly (to my shame) joined in, automatically assuming a number of things: 1. It was VB6 - therefore it was sh!t. 2. I could do infinitely better than the previous work. 3. It must be poorly designed, because it was old. Now, I've been here for, well, nearly a year now, and I've had a chance to use the ......
Posted On Thursday, July 10, 2008 8:05 PM | Comments (0)

The decidedly badly named LoadingCircle WPF Control Pt 2

Badly named Loading Circle PT2 ---------------------------... So, in my last post (http://geekswithblogs.net/... I created a square LoadingCircle UserControl, using old skool WinForms multi-threading in the code behind file, and Xamly fun on the front end.. But there were problems (of course there were), firstly, the animation, whilst it *did* move, was a very 'on/off' affair, i.e. the Ellipse was ......
Posted On Wednesday, July 9, 2008 10:57 AM | Comments (0)

The decidedly badly named LoadingCircle WPF Control Pt 1

Soooo... I've been playing around with WPF for a while now, generally building small apps for peeps at work, or my own stuff, and one of the things that happens in quite a few cases is the dreaded 'data retrieval' phase. During said phase, the app will go into a state of nothingness whilst the data is retrieved, at which point it'll come back and be useable again. Now, we all know the way to keep the UI active is to multi-thread that bad boy, and that's where I'm at. In the app I'm thinking of, whilst ......
Posted On Friday, July 4, 2008 12:44 PM | Comments (0)