Calvin Hsia's WebLog

The Windows Start menu is very useful. I typically access some programs more than others. You can open the start menu (or Windows Explorer (Windows key+E)), navigate to a program (or document or picture or…) and drag/drop it onto the main part of the...

Here’s a way to manipulate photos from within some Microsoft products. In the prior post , I wrote some code to write and draw directly on a JPG image. It draws text, a timestamp, and an ellipse with a gradient brush onto a JPG and then saves it out...

Here’s some code to manipulate photos using the GDIPlus class library that ships with VFP 9. It creates a GPImage object out of a JPG, then creates a GPGraphics object, draws some text and an ellipse on that object, then saves it to a new filename. The...

I received a comment on my blog VFP handles some images differently with GDIPlus Here's another problem with the way that VFP hooks into GDI+. If a JPG has malformed EXIF data, VFP will refuse to display it in a standard picture object. It returns...

If a RichText control on a form doesn’t have focus yet, it responds to being clicked on by calling the IOleControlSite::OnFocus method inside VFP. The VFP code says Aha!: there is a focus change happening, so it fires the LOSTFOCUS event for the control...

FoxPro allows users to embed files into an APP or EXE file using the project manager. That means an icon or JPG can be embedded inside so it can’t be used externally except by the application. However, there is a bug in some file functions that attempt...

At least once a week I download my photos to a new folder on one of my computers. As part of that process I run some code that generates thumbnail images into a table. With almost 22,000 pictures, the thumbnail table is almost 100 megabytes (1 Meg for...

Often I’m asked to demo Foxpro to people who’ve never seen it before. In one demo I show how simple it is to create a usable one to many form that allows multiple instances with collision detection and resolution. From the main menu choose File...

Visual Foxpro 9 uses GDIPlus to handle certain kinds of image files, such as JPG, GIF. Because the ability to decode image formats is now centralized in the operating system, VFP can take advantage of OS updates to file formats as well as other formats...

Several months ago, I saw an article about the FireFox browser, and how it could do “Tabbed browsing”. One of the main things I disliked about Internet Explorer was that in order to see multiple web pages, you have to have multiple windows. Alt-Tab to...

My 3 year old Acer TravelMate 100 TabletPC hard disk (20G) was dying. It has served me well as a portable machine. I love the tablet features and the small size. It was one of the original prototype tablets that I started using about 6 months before TabletPCs...

In this post I published 100 lines of code that showed how to get a visual representation of your hard disk to see which folders take the most space. It showed that my Outlook mailbox was half a gigabyte. (“C:\DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS\CALVINH\LOCAL SETTINGS...