load of tosh : .NET

DirectSound Metronome

Tosh Meston — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 01:21:00 GMT

My former intern Albert has finished his metronome project that uses DirectSound and talks about some of the issues he hit on his MSN Space -- The Groove Yard.

It Works! Creating streaming, live audio is sorta easy! This opens the doors for all kinds of projects…(audio synth? Audio sampler?).

RE: InvariantCulture and DateTime.ToString()

Tosh Meston — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 09:51:00 GMT

Hey Omar, regarding this entry... Your comments are closed so I thought I'd let the trackback do the talking. I just wanted to say I have been bitten by this kind of thing before as well. This would work too.

get
{
return DateUtc.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture) + ".dayfeedback.xml";
}

Looking for .NET Forum Control

Tosh Meston — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 09:07:00 GMT

I think thinking about incorporating forums into my pickup sports sites - InfiniteHoops.com and InfiniteSoccer.com - and although I am tempted to write my own forum code, the fact is I have so little time and this is something I think there are several implementations in .NET already. Anybody using a .NET forum control or app that they like and would recommend? Let me know. Thanks. - T -

Scrollable Resizable Datagrid

Tosh Meston — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 05:24:00 GMT

The Code Project has a project by Pedro Maia Costa based on an HTC we put out for a Web Team Talking article a couple years ago. NIce job, Pedro. For me one of the great benefits of writing on the web in a developer community like blogs.msdn.com is that you often get good feedback from developers running into the same sorts of problems as you. And many times you'll discover a solution that's pretty elegant. I think the best solution to make column headers fixed on an HTML table in IE is this one by SlingFive. No HTC, no script save a simple CSS expression. Simple, nice.

Win32 API Equivalents in .NET

Tosh Meston — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 00:21:00 GMT

This is from January, but it's making the rounds again. Here's a listing of .NET Framework equivalents of the Win32 API. Highly useful to some. Historically interesting as well.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/win32map.asp

Blog Paging via T-SQL Stored Proc

Tosh Meston — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 09:30:00 GMT

It's around two a.m. on a Sunday morning. I am finishing off a bowl of Frankenberry after completing some work to incorporate paging into my photoblog site. At first I thought I'd handle the paging at the application level and just do a simple query and find the row range that I need, but ultimately I resisted because a) it's in efficient and b) I should learn how to do this in SQL to add it to my bag of tricks. I searched and found a stored proc by Anatoly Lubarsky, which works well when paging by ID and in ascending order. I modified it to work in reverse chronological order (by the date my photos were taken), which I think is handy for geeks like me building our own weblog tools. Anyhow, I thought I'd share...

ALTER proc GetPicturePage

(

@Page int,

@PageSize int

)

begin

set nocount on

declare @TotalRowsNum int

declare @FirstSelectingRowNum int

declare @TakenDateTime datetime

select @TotalRowsNum = count(PictureId) from Pictures where IsDeleted = 0

select @FirstSelectingRowNum = ((@Page - 1) * @PageSize) + 1

if (@FirstSelectingRowNum <= @TotalRowsNum)

begin

set rowcount @FirstSelectingRowNum

select @TakenDateTime = TakenDateTime

from Pictures

where IsDeleted = 0

order by TakenDateTime desc, ImageOriginal desc

set rowcount @PageSize

select * from Pictures

where TakenDateTime <= @TakenDateTime and IsDeleted = 0

order by TakenDateTime desc, ImageOriginal desc

end

set nocount off

end

A Few Interesting System.Drawing Posts

Tosh Meston — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 07:33:00 GMT

Here are a few posts on some fun stuff in System.Drawing that I found interesting. The first is a follow up to Omar Shahine's earlier post on a perf tip loading an Image from a Stream. The second I forgot to flag for follow up, but RSS Bandit has a nice local search which found it right away. Handy.

System.Drawing.Imaging performance fix in .NET 1.1 SP1 via shahine.com/omar/

Render PNG from ASPX via Chris Taylor

This one - a web control that generates rounded corner images on a table - is older, but slick nonetheless. Looks nice with the corners anti-aliased. RoundedCorners Web Control Update via Scott Mitchell

XP SP2 and .NET 1.1 SP1

Tosh Meston — Sun, 05 Sep 2004 01:17:00 GMT

With all the articles and blog entries about these two recent service packs I was wondering if I would see anything interesting when I installed them on my laptop and home web server. The answer is no. Everything just works. My sites continue to chug along and my apps are just fine. I guess that doesn't make a good story.

HtmlEncode(string, TextWriter)

Tosh Meston — Fri, 23 Jul 2004 07:12:00 GMT

A friend pointed out the overload of HttpUtility.HtmlEncode today that I hadn't played with yet. No doubt every ASP developer has played with the version that takes in a string and returns the Html encoded string. This one will take a string and output the Html encoded text to a TextWriter, in many cases directly to the Html stream via Response.Output. So, one might use it like:

HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(BlogEntry.Text, Response.Output);

Handy.

More Fun with Images (or System.Drawing Redux)

Tosh Meston — Wed, 21 Jul 2004 07:05:00 GMT

It’s high time I wrote another little piece on what I have been programming in my spare time. I mentioned before that I have been playing with digital photos, extracting EXIF dates with Omar’s photo library (very handy) and posting them to the web for friends and family. Well, Pavel Lebedinsky mentioned in the comments of that entry that GetImageThumbnail gave worse results than using DrawImage with InterpolationMode.HighQualityBicubic. I took it to heart and started playing around with the classes in System.Drawing. I also found this article on The Code Project which gave a nice example of how to do exactly what I wanted – just scale down my digital pictures to a more web appropriate size and make thumbnails too – using DrawImage. I had been just creating a new Bitmap based off an instance that loads one of my jpegs and passing in the new width and height to the constructor. The simplicity is what I really liked about my method, but anyhow… in looking at my scaled down bitmaps I could see that they were a little grainy. I decided to run a comparison against the code in the Code Project example.

Sure enough, the DrawImage with InterpolationMode.HighQualityBicubic did produce a better quality image at 480 pixels across. See CreateImage vs. CreateImage2 below. CreateImage2 calls into The Code Project example.

Next I tried Pavel’s suggestion that GetThumbnailImage produces a worse image than one with DrawImage and HiQualityBicubic. I set my thumbnail width at 96 pixels and gave it a shot. It turns out that the thumbnail extracted from the original image via GetThumbnailImage is less grainy. That’s not to say if you had an image without an embedded thumbnail it would be better than the DrawImage solution, but for my case, with our 3.2 megapixel Olympus, it is the best code path so far.

As a matter of fact, we are looking for a new camera that is more pocket-sized (Canon Elph sized) at something like 4 megapixel. Anybody have a camera they like and recommend?

/// <summary>

/// The main entry point for the application.

/// </summary>

[STAThread]

static void Main(string[] args)

{

CreateImage("145.jpg", "145_1.jpg", 480, ImageFormat.Jpeg);

CreateImage2("145.jpg", "145_2.jpg", 480, ImageFormat.Jpeg); // Better quality at 480 pixels wide

CreateImage2("145.jpg", "145_3.jpg", 96, ImageFormat.Jpeg);

CreateThumbnailImage("145.jpg", "145_4.jpg"); // Better quality at 96 pixels wide if image has an embedded thumbnail

}

internal static void CreateImage(string strOriginalImage, string strOutputImage, int intWidth, ImageFormat imgFmt)

{

Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap(strOriginalImage);

double dblRatio = Convert.ToDouble(bmp.Height) / Convert.ToDouble(bmp.Width);

int intHeight = Convert.ToInt32(intWidth * dblRatio);

Image img = new Bitmap(bmp, intWidth, intHeight);

img.Save(strOutputImage, imgFmt);

bmp.Dispose();

img.Dispose();

}

internal static void CreateImage2(string strOriginalImage, string strOutputImage, int intWidth, ImageFormat imgFmt)

{

Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap(strOriginalImage);

double dblRatio = Convert.ToDouble(bmp.Height) / Convert.ToDouble(bmp.Width);

int intHeight = Convert.ToInt32(intWidth * dblRatio);

Image img = FixedSize(bmp, intWidth, intHeight);

img.Save(strOutputImage, imgFmt);

bmp.Dispose();

img.Dispose();

}

internal static Image FixedSize(Image imgPhoto, int Width, int Height)

{

int sourceWidth = imgPhoto.Width;

int sourceHeight = imgPhoto.Height;

int sourceX = 0;

int sourceY = 0;

int destX = 0;

int destY = 0;

float nPercent = 0;

float nPercentW = 0;

float nPercentH = 0;

nPercentW = ((float)Width/(float)sourceWidth);

nPercentH = ((float)Height/(float)sourceHeight);

if(nPercentH < nPercentW)

{

nPercent = nPercentH;

destX = System.Convert.ToInt16((Width -

(sourceWidth * nPercent))/2);

}

else

{

nPercent = nPercentW;

destY = System.Convert.ToInt16((Height -

(sourceHeight * nPercent))/2);

}

int destWidth = (int)(sourceWidth * nPercent);

int destHeight = (int)(sourceHeight * nPercent);

Bitmap bmPhoto = new Bitmap(Width, Height,

PixelFormat.Format24bppRgb);

bmPhoto.SetResolution(imgPhoto.HorizontalResolution,

imgPhoto.VerticalResolution);

Graphics grPhoto = Graphics.FromImage(bmPhoto);

grPhoto.Clear(Color.Red);

grPhoto.InterpolationMode =

InterpolationMode.HighQualityBicubic;

grPhoto.DrawImage(imgPhoto,

new Rectangle(destX,destY,destWidth,destHeight),

new Rectangle(sourceX,sourceY,sourceWidth,sourceHeight),

GraphicsUnit.Pixel);

grPhoto.Dispose();

return bmPhoto;

}

internal static void CreateThumbnailImage(string strOriginalImage, string strThumbnailImage)

{

Image.GetThumbnailImageAbort cbImg = new Image.GetThumbnailImageAbort(ThumbnailCallback);

Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap(strOriginalImage);

double dblRatio = Convert.ToDouble(bmp.Height) / Convert.ToDouble(bmp.Width);

int intHeight = Convert.ToInt32(96.0 * dblRatio);

Image img = bmp.GetThumbnailImage(96, intHeight, cbImg, IntPtr.Zero);

img.Save(strThumbnailImage);

bmp.Dispose();

img.Dispose();

}

internal static bool ThumbnailCallback()

{

return false;

}

Image APIs

Tosh Meston — Wed, 23 Jun 2004 03:41:00 GMT

I have the opportunity to take lots and lots of pictures these days and share them with family and friends. You can guess why, but I am reluctant to be as open with my private life as say KC and David. Anyhow I decided to create a photoblog for our relatives to keep up to date and allow uploading and automatic conversion of my large jpegs to a more web appropriate size and even to thumbnails. I had been using a very nice command-line utility convert.exe which is a part of the ImageMagick toolkit to resize image after the upload. Much nicer than manually converting each one in Digital Image Pro. Digital Image is handy by the way. Very nice for image touch-ups, smart erase and printing. Would love to see VBA inside that tool for automating repetitive tasks. Anyhow, in doing this and talking with some of the digital photogs in my group I learned about EXIF and the metadata therein, including to my surprise, an actual thumbnail embedded in the file. I then remembered Omar Shahine had an entry about a tool he'd built - JPEG Hammer - and I decided to take a look at that as well as his GotDotNet workspace to see how he was creating thumbnails. Finally, revelation. I found Image.GetThumbnailImage and Graphics.DrawImage methods in System.Drawing. I love this. Now I have the happy task of rewriting to remove an external dependency.

Strongly Typed Resources in Whidbey

Tosh Meston — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 19:57:00 GMT

This is pretty handy. Can't wait. Kit George has some vb demo code as well.

Exchange Team Blog, Dave Winer and a pubDate

Tosh Meston — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 07:44:00 GMT

Well, this morning the Exchange team blog was announced on KC's feed, which is fantastic. Hopefully, I can send a few OWA tips that way. I guess we will have to wait and see.

This afternoon I attended a talk by Dave Winer at MS. It was my first time seeing Dave in person after having read DaveNet since 95 or so. I was hoping to see Dare there to see if he'd bring up any of this. Lots of laptops in audience with various editors open. A Movable Type in front of me, a .Text to the left.

As Dave talked about his hopes for a day when RSS renders television's influence over politics impotent, I kept thinking that the interesting thing about RSS is the exhaustive degree to which people are trying to apply this technology. What is it about this particular XML application that makes people want to see if it will work with X, where X is anything from journaling to headlines to campaign politics to selling books to calendaring to MP3 streaming?

This evening I was in such a “RSS is cool” state of mind that I finally got down to fixing some bugs in my own hoops feed. I had been using a <dc:date> in place of a <pubDate> on my items solely because I felt the RFC822 date format was irritating. Worked just fine inside SharpReader, but I have recently switched back to RSS Bandit which seems to ignore the dc:date. Anyhow, I bit the bullet and whipped out this. I am so lame for not doing it earlier.

private static string GetRfc822DateString(DateTime dt)
{
return string.Format("{0:ddd}, {0:dd} {0:MMM} {0:yyyy} {0:hh}:{0:mm}:{0:ss} GMT", dt.ToUniversalTime());
}

Embedding Scripts as Resources in Whidbey

Tosh Meston — Wed, 28 Jan 2004 20:16:00 GMT

Whidbey has a method of embedding scripts, images, css, htc, etc. as resources in your code-behind assembly. Nice solution to the problem of versioning script files. Also, makes deployment easier.

If you're curious, here's an article about it.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/webresource.asp

InfiniteHoops.com Milestone 100

Tosh Meston — Mon, 22 Dec 2003 21:00:00 GMT

My little .NET project InfiniteHoops.com for finding and scheduling basketball games reached 100 registered players on Saturday, I am pleased to say. Development in recent weeks has been mostly in the area of UI and ease of use improvements. I have also started my link exchange campaign starting with NBA webloggers. This seems to be driving the new users and has boosted my Google rank to 4. I can also find my site now on the 19th page of a “pickup basketball” Google search. Still terrible, but before the link exchange I couldn't find it in the top 50 pages. Sadly, this blog is listed on page 8 of the same search. I have also added a nightly NBA scores control to the site which uses WebRequest and Regex. I also make good use of output caching as to be a good internet citizen and not annoy my data source. The Google ads are generating some money, but not too much. I think that could be improved by displaying a variety of ads. As it happens I am seeing the same ones repeated quite frequently.

In short, the growth is slow, but it's there.