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8/6/2006 This is the end.So after a somewhat messy night last night and a grand total of 3 hours sleep I’ve been trying to think about what I can put in my last, 50th, blog post. I don’t really have too much else to say, I’m glad I entered the competition, I’m happy I’ve reached the end and submitted a working product and I’m happy that I’ve learned a lot about C#, .NET and Visual Studio, but most of the people reading this would have probably picked that up from the last 49 entries. So I decided to show you my TODO list which I’ve been working from, adding too and marking off over the last 2 weeks.
TODO:
BUGS:
8/5/2006 Publish.The Publish functionality in Visual C# Express worked a treat; everything is working nicely on all the different computers I’ve tested it on (thanks to Justin, Arron and Gavin). The final package compresses nicely into a RAR at about 500k, I’d put it up for download but I’m not sure if that would violate any rules. The project should be downloadable after it’s submitted anyway.
Using the publish functionality in the Visual C# Express was a breeze. The only problems I had stemmed from my idiocy where I had a hard coded database connection string. Of course I found that out after I had waited for the .NET 2.0 and SQL Server Express to install the 333 MHz Celeron test machine I was trying it on. :)
To publish your project go to the Project menu, and choose ProjectName Properties, where ProjectName is your project name. Click the Publish link on the left and then select where you want to publish the project to, I put it in a temp directory on my hard drive. Click the Options button and then enter the appropriate information about your project, name, language, etc. Once you’ve entered that information uncheck the Automatically increment revision with each publish option. That way when you mess up the first ten times it’s still at 1.0.
Then click the Publish Wizard button to go through a few more options and then your application should be published. The great thing about the Publish functionality is that it checks if the user has .NET 2.0 and SQL Express Server and if it doesn’t fetches and installs them for the user. The installer also adds the program to the Add/Remove programs list in Windows. This makes things so much simpler from my point of view.
The only problem (aside from my silly connection string issue) was the help file not being included in my published application. I fixed this by changing the properties of the help file in my project. I set Copy To Output Directory to Always and changed the Build Action to content. The next time I published the application the help file was included as expected. One other minor issue I had was the installer having problems installing over a previous version but that isn’t exactly rare.
I’d like to use the Auto Update functionality, it looks really simple to implement and for on going projects I imagine it would be hugely useful to developers. To check out the functionality click the Updates button just above the Options button on the Publish page.
Good luck to all contestants that end up submitting their project, I hope you’ve all enjoyed the competition as much as I have. It’s given me a nice timeline to work through and I feel a nice fuzzy feeling deep down inside that all work in the project has been completed by me, no inclusion of anyone else code or work. For now I’m going out to celebrate :) 8/4/2006 More Bug Fixing.So after some more bug fixing I’m nearly there. There isn’t much to blog about because what I’m doing is revising code I’ve talked about before, though I did figure out something handy that others may find useful.
Say you have a form were the user clicks the create button to submit the details on the form. The create button is the form’s AcceptButton property. If you check the details and find the user has entered something incorrectly, or not entered anything at all how can you prevent the form from closing? After thinking about it for a while (and now I’m writing this I probably could have used ErrorProviders and btnCreate.Enable = false, but oh well) the solution I came up with was to have the check function set a property called CloseForm. If the check function returns false the form still tries to exit, however you can fire the FormClosing event and if the CloseForm property is set to false, set e.Cancel = true; in the FormClosing event. This stopped my cancel button from working however, to fix that I simply set CloseForm to true when the cancel button is clicked, simple.
I also tried to clean up the drawing of the FriendMap so lines didn’t visibly intersect circles (so the circles are drawn on top). It looks a little better though it looks a little more confusing too since you notice a friend has 4 lines going into them. To combat this I tried drawing lines from the centre of the circle rather then the right edge, however that didn’t help much so I reduced the line thickness so lines were easier to trace.
Over tonight and tomorrow I’ll look at figuring out how I can distribute my application and get everything ready for submission for Sunday. I’ll also have a few rounds of Street Fighter II over Xbox Live. It seems that there are more good games coming out on Xbox Live Arcade than there are in stores. 8/3/2006 Circles.Last night I sat down and wrote the help file for my application. I wrote the topics in word and then used HTML Help to compile them into the CHM format. HTML Help was a little bit temperamental and didn’t compile a few times due to the paths of the html files. Everything seemed to be fine if you didn’t save and load the project again though so I just did it all at once. I couldn’t figure out how to create sections in the help file but since there aren’t too many pages I didn’t fuss over it. The file loads and displays nicely from within my application and even though HTML Help is a bit archaic I’m glad I went the CHM route.
Writing the help file was (as everyone would expect) boring however it made me use my application and helped me discover a few more bugs, so in that regard it was a worth while process. Now I just need to work on fixing the newly discovered bugs before the project is due.
One bug I did fix today was my line drawing problem when relationships were more than one person deep. I’d thought about this problem for a while but never reached a work able solution, I originally thought of storing the “parent” circle as a property but that idea was shot when I came to implement it due to the way I draw friends using recursion. So the parent would be updated anytime there were children, which would leave me with the same problem.
So after looking at the code and thinking about how I could do it I came up with the idea of moving X number of circles backward, where X is the number of children a parent has. This was pretty easy to do, if the parent circle was on the same line as the child circle (X – (size * childCount)), but when the child circle was on the next line it got a little more complicated. I spent a lot longer (45 minutes) figuring the problem out and implementing it than I would have liked (15 minutes) seeing as the solution ended up being pretty simple. Calculate the number of pixels behind X we are, determine how many circles can fit in that amount of pixels (the number of circles on the new line we need to move back), then determine the new X position by maxCirclesPerLine – previousLineCircles * circleSize.
I expect most of the remaining bugs and features to be fixed or added by tomorrow night and then I’ll spend Saturday figuring out how to distribute my program so people can actually use it. 8/2/2006 Windows Live SpacesOh my, it appears that MSN Spaces has become Windows Live Spaces and the change over hasn’t gone too smoothly for my blog. At least my blog is a little more readable in Firefox now. Hopefully the lay out issues will be fixed up soon, I’d try messing around with it myself but the Spaces backend is temperamental to say the least and I’d probably end up spending a hour making it look worse or at best the same. Help! Part 2.Yesterday I talked about how create a CHM file but I didn’t mention how to include into your project and have it display when a user wants it. I’ve toyed around with Visual C# and this is the method that I’ve used. Now all I need to do is write some help and everyone will be happy.
To include the file in your project load Visual C# and load your project, then find the Solution Explorer. Right click on the solution and mouse over the Add menu and then select Existing Item this displays a standard dialog box you should be familiar with. Navigate to where your Compiled HTML help file is and select it. The file should now appear in the project along with your forms and code. Right click on the file and choose properties, then set the Copy to Output Directory property to Copy Always or Copy if Newer. This allows you to easily reference the help file with out worrying about file paths later on.
To get your help file displaying in your application is a relatively easy process once you know how. I wasn’t too sure until I saw the HelpProvider control. Drag the control on to your form and rename it to something meaningful if you feel inclined. Now we need to change the HelpNamespace property of the HelpProvider to the name of the CHM that was added to the project, in my case FriendMapHelp.chm.
Once the HelpProvider is on your form and has been set up we need to create some events that will utilise it, for example the user clicking Index in the Help menu. In the Click event that has just been created add the following line.
System.Windows.Forms.Help.ShowHelp(this, hlpFriendMap.HelpNamespace);
Where this is the parent control (in my case, the main form of my application), hlpFriendMap is the HelpProvider control that was added and it’s property HelpNamespace is the name of this Compiled HTML help file. After compiling and running the application and clicking on the help button you should be shown your help file.
Now all I have to do is write the help file for my application. 8/1/2006 Help!So like most of the other active contestants I’m currently implementing a help file for my application. As said writing help is the most boring part for a developer (for me at least) and to be honest, I don’t think developers can write help files. Well, a developer who has been working on the project from day one anyway. We just know how to do things, we know what to do and what not to do so trying to explain it to someone who hasn’t is difficult because something you take for granted is something a user might not know.
But I digress. Until tonight I had no idea how I’d implement a help file for my application. The help file wouldn’t be too large, but I’d the user to be able to see a list of topics and search for keywords. These requirements, unless I wanted to spend a significant time writing code, limited me to using the compiled HTML format or CHM. How can I implement CHM help in my application though?
After a bit of searching I discovered that Microsoft have an application available for the creation of CHM files, this application (aptly named HTML Help) can be found here. HTML Help looks very Windows 98, I’m somewhat surprised Microsoft haven’t implemented updated version within Visual Studio, maybe they have in the fuller versions? I’m not sure.
To create a CHM file a user must choose the New option from the File menu and select Project from the dialog box that is displayed. This will begin a wizard running the user through creating a new project, allowing them to convert from previous help files and add existing files to the project. Once the project has been created (assuming no content has been added) the user must create the content so the help file is actually helpful.
To add content click on the Contents tab and follow the prompts to create a new contents file. This is what the user will see when they first load the help file. There won’t be anything in there yet because it has just been created. To add some content add a HTML file to the project from the File, New menu and enter a heading for the page. Now content can be added to this html file, a user can create as many files as they want. Once the user is done adding content to the help file HTML files can be added to the project by clicking the Insert a page link on the left of the window. When finished adding files the user can go to the File menu and choose Compile…. This will result in a compiled CHM that can be viewed by the user, either directly through Windows or from your application.
So there is a very elementary crash course on how to create a CHM file for use in your application. Hopefully a few people will find this step by step process useful. I’ll look into how to actually get the CHM displaying from within an application tomorrow and blog about that, but for now it’s time for bed. 7/31/2006 Lines.
Linked above is the work I accomplished today, I added code to determine and draw the strength of a relationship link. This formula takes into account the friend rating, the years the friend has been known, the importance and rating of the last event and the days since the last event. I then multiplied that figure (it’s always between 0 and 1) by 7 and there you go, weighted lines. Why 7? Because that’s what looked the best on the map. :)
Another cool .NET feature I learned about today (and appreciate even more after having been doing a rather date math heavy PHP app at work recently.) is the TimeSpan class used in conjunction with the DateTime.Subtract() method. The TimeSpan class in my application is used to get the number of days since the last event and today. However you can also get information such as hours, seconds, milliseconds etcetera.
Something that was a little harder than I though it would be was creating a context menu for my Friends DataGridView. I assumed that I’d be able to access the RowIndex through a menu item click, however I couldn’t. I also figured that the row I had clicked on would become selected. I had a look through the DataGridView events (is there an object with properties and events than a DGV?) and found the RowContextMenuStripNeeded event, by firing this event I’m able to get the RowIndex, I store the RowIndex in the ContextMenu’s tag for easy access. I also select the DataGridView row in this method with the line, dgvFriends.Rows[e.RowIndex].Selected = true;
Tomorrow I hope to work on the circle weighting (and possibly colouring, I’m not sure if I’ll implement that yet.) and add a ContextMenu for the events DataGridView. Other than using it as a shortcut to load friends and events I’m not sure what else I can put in the ContextMenus. It feels wrong only having one option to choose from in a ContextMenu. 7/30/2006 Another Lazy Sunday.I think it’s safe to say that Sundays are not my best developing days. I didn’t get a whole lot done today and only spent about four hours on my application. I started the day with good intentions but then it went down hill from there. On the upside Ninety Nine Nights for the 360 looks fun and I finished Cloning Clyde.
Application wise I worked out a few more bugs and shined up a few areas of the application. One problem I was having that I mentioned last week (I think) was my contacts owner drawn ListBox not drawing anything. I spent ages one day last week trying to figure out why the DrawItem and MeasureItem events were not firing. I looked through my code, multiple times over, I checked that the events were actually set up (unlike last time this happened), they were and I checked the designer code and everything seemed fine. I wanted to get this fixed today so I sat down and had a look again and ended up finding out the problem. For some reason this line had been removed from the designer code, this.Controls.Add(this.lstContacts);. So the ListBox was never added, except the control displayed as a ListBox on the form in the designer and when the application ran. In the end I was happy it was fixed but still annoyed it took so long to fix.
Oh well. Today I ended up fixing all but one of the bugs on my list. Tomorrow should be more productive and I’ll try and get that bug fixed. Depending on how quickly I’m able to fix it I may also start adding a few more small features just to make things a little more hectic. 7/29/2006 Bug Fixing.After a fair bit of “research” last night I sat down this morning to begin working though my TODO and BUG list, grabbing at the low hanging fruit first. I’ve fixed 25 bugs today so far, but they are all of the relatively easy ones and a few of the more medium difficulty ones. Regardless of how hard the bugs have been to fix the time I’ve spent today is well reflected in the applications quality.
One of the areas of my application I wanted to fix today was the ComboBoxes. I’ve used ComboBoxes fairly extensively through out my application and they were generally filled with entries from the database. This was all well and good except that users could still put their own entry in and that would cause problems. This problem was something that I thought would be easy to fix and I never got around to finding out how to make a ComboBox read only. Well, for a change, I was right and making a ComboBox read only is as easy as setting it’s DropDownStyle property to DropDownList.
In fixing these bugs I’ve come across an issue with the ToolStrip smart tag, when I remove buttons from a ToolStrip using the Edit Items… link that are between other buttons, the spacing of the buttons stays the same in the designer, as if the deleted buttons were still there. However when the application runs the buttons are aligned properly. The buttons stay the same even after rebuilding the project.
In other news that developers may be interested in Microsoft has announced Sandcastle, a documentation compiler http://blogs.msdn.com/sandcastle/. While I wouldn’t find a use for it on a small project such as this (especially as there is little to no documentation) on a larger project it would be great. It’s also great to see Microsoft releasing more free tools for developers.
I’m pleased I decide against implementing a the FriendMap control as a planar graph. It would have caused me a significant amount of stress trying to get it working in such a short period of time and would have prevented me from fixing existing issues, although it would have looked a lot nicer than the current implementation. Tomorrow I plan on climbing the tree a bit and taking a swing at the medium and high hanging fruit. That’s usually sweeter right? 7/28/2006 9 Days Left.Since I was not the mood for programming when I got home last night I went through my application and made a list of everything that needs doing before the 6th of August. Unfortunately the list is a lot bigger than I’d like it to be so some things will have to be cut and others made not as fully featured as I’d like them to be. The list has about 20 entries, pretty much 50/50 between TODOs and BUGs, of course I’m looking forward to the TODOs introducing more bugs. My weekend is looking somewhat busy with activities tonight and tomorrow night, so I’ll have to make the best of Saturday during the day and Sunday, only 9 more days until the project is due. I’m glad it’s due on a Sunday giving me a weekend to work on it.
In other news I discovered (via the CodeProject forums) that Microsoft have the MSDN library available as a stand alone download, it’s pretty huge if you get the whole package but useful to have. I often find my self developing with out Internet access and I want to know something about the object I’m working on in more detail than Intellisense provides, so having the MSDN library available on my computer will fix that problem.
The library can downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=373930CB-A3D7-4EA5-B421-DD6818DC7C41&displaylang=en 7/27/2006 Escaping SQL.I’ve been terribly busy with a few real life things since I got back so I’ve not had much time to do any work on my application. I’m slowly progressing bit by bit though. For the little time I programmed today I fixed some bugs and added some code to escape the SQL queries the user can add input to.
Escaping SQL in .NET is apparently done automatically when using ADO.NET correctly by using the following code.
SqlCommand command = new SqlCommand("SELECT * from people where name = " + txtFilter.Text, dbConn)But I’m not using ADO.NET correctly so that’s crazy talk. The way I’m doing it is escaping the user input using the Regex.Replace() function, as so.
private string EscapeText(string text) { return Regex.Replace(text, "'", @"''"); }
Again, I really need to learn ADO.NET properly. :)
Tomorrow will be another busy day where I won’t have any time to work on my program. I’ll have to spend the majority of this weekend fixing bugs and getting my application ready for submission. It’s getting close. 7/25/2006 Back.Unfortunately I’m back in the land of work after a nice break. I read up on graph theory and I’ve decided that trying to implement a planar graph in such a small window of time for my application is a bad idea and that the time would be better spent adding polish and fixing as many bugs as possible. Once the application has been submitted I’ll implement the planar graph, just so I can say I’ve done it.
I did a little bit of work while I was away (aside from reading up graph theory) but nothing too major. I finally added the ability for some one to create a new owner; it was just something I never got around to doing until now. I also changed a few areas that were still using DataSets and therefore not updating when rows were added to the database. Hopefully I don’t lose too many points for that.
I’ll get back into it proper tomorrow and start work on fixing a few more issues (my contacts list box has stopped drawing itself for some reason) but for now I’m still on Holiday. 7/23/2006 Holiday!I fixed my problem yesterday of the DataSet not being updated, well more worked around it. After trying everything I could think I eventually gave up and tried working around it. In the end I selected what I wanted from the table, then set the properties of the combo box to display what I selected. I’ll paste the code below to show you what I mean.
private void FillEventCategory() { DatabaseInfo dbInfo = new DatabaseInfo(); SqlCommandBuilder sqlCb; string query = "select event_category_id, name from event_category"; SqlDataAdapter dataAdapter = new SqlDataAdapter(query, dbInfo.ConnectionString); sqlCb = new SqlCommandBuilder(dataAdapter);
DataSet dataSet = new DataSet(); dataAdapter.Fill(dataSet); DataTable dataTable = dataSet.Tables[0];
cmbEventCategory.DataSource = dataTable; cmbEventCategory.DisplayMember = "name"; cmbEventCategory.ValueMember = "event_category_id"; }
This code is called from the forms OnLoad event and as you can see selects fields from the event category table and sets the DataSource of the combo box to the results, and then sets the DisplayMember and ValueMember properties. I know this isn’t the correct way but it’s the way that ended up working for me. I’m looking forward to getting the ADO.NET Programming book from Manning Publications so I can see what the correct way use ADO.NET is.
With that I’m off for two days to read up on graph theory and how I can use it in my application. I think I’ve updated my blog every day this month so hopefully no one will miss me :P 7/22/2006 Saturday!I got very little done today; I caught up with a friend after being behind him on the freeway coming home this morning. Lunch turned into mixing which then turned into dinner and then playing xbox for a while, oh well, I’m on holiday. I did get a little bit of coding done but not too much, I fixed a plainly obvious bug that was displaying the category id rather than the text.
One of the other bugs I wanted to fix today wasn’t fixed, my noob ADO.NET code came to bite me in the ass as I thought it would. When adding events or friends the categories and such are selected from the data sets. Since my code updates the database directly the data set stays the same. I’ve tried a few different things (DataSet.Table.Rows.Add(newRow), updating the dataset from the database) but couldn’t get it working; I’ll have to look into it a bit more closely in the few hours I’ve got tomorrow. 7/21/2006 Uh oh.Unfortunately drawing the lines in a neat way isn’t as easy as I was hoping it would be, I’ve had a look around and deduced that my problem is related to Graph Theory. Graph Theory is the drawing of points and the lines from those points, in my FriendMap application each friend is a point, and the link between them can be represented by line. In my applications case I want an undirected, planar graph. An algorithm that produces no intersections is better than one that does produce intersecting lines, however not all graphs can be drawn in such a way. Wikipedia has more information about Graph Theory here. Looks like I’ll be taking some light reading along on my two day holiday.
Of course simply reading about Graph Theory isn’t going to solve my problem. I’ve already thought about ways I can display the map in a neater fashion and after I’ve read up a little more I’ll try and implement it. What I’m imagining is the owner point being moved into the centre of map and links being drawn from there. The same principle would be followed for friends who are linked to other friends. So if I’m friends with Friend A and Friend A knows Friends B, C, and D. The owner point (me) would be in the centre of the screen, linked to Friend A would be centre of Friends B, C and D. What I’m a little unclear on at the moment is how to store where people are located or even if I need too after they’ve been drawn. As I said, I’ll do more reading while I’m away.
I’ll try spending a few days after I get back implementing a cleaner graph and if I can’t do that I’ll have to submit with the graph I have now. Since I won’t be implementing the new graph tomorrow I’ll spend the day going through the application and fixing bugs. There are a fair few small bugs that I’ve left behind in the pursuit of getting my application close to finished. 7/20/2006 Cloning Neil.
I didn’t get too much done today due to a longer day at work and using an hour of my development time playing the new Xbox Live Arcade game Cloning Clyde (I could certainly use some clones.). I accomplished what I set out to do though which is good, the drawing of the lines didn’t take as long as I thought it would.
Linked above is the result of tonight’s work. Relating to yesterdays post I figured out why the MessageBox informing the user the map had run out of space was being continually displayed. It was something pretty silly and due to my inexperience with Windows.Forms. Drawing the MessageBox over the control invalidated the panel, causing the panel to be redrawn, redrawing the panel in the same size results in the same message being displayed, which invalidates the panel. Hooray for infinite loops! I didn’t realise the panel was being redrawn when the MessageBox was displayed. To solve the issue I simply wrote the error on the Panel using the DrawString method, the error is red so it stands out.
Once I had that problem fixed it was time to start drawing the links between friends. This ended up being easier than I thought it would be and just involves using the function DrawLine from the Graphics class to, surprisingly, draw a line. Lines are drawn between two points, the starting circle and the destination circle (I used Point objects to set where the lines are drawn but there are a few overloads for DrawLine).
As you can see the map looks very messy with lines intersecting circles and other lines. I’m not too sure at the moment how I’m going to tidy it up. I’ll look into it more tonight and tomorrow and post my findings. The map at the moment isn’t displaying relationship strength or any other information I want it too. I’ll leave that until last, I’d rather have it display cleanly first.
There won’t be any programming done tomorrow (well, at least on this project) since I’ll be heading out for a change. If I’ve figured out how to implement a cleaner graph I will start work on that Saturday and hopefully muse about any problems I’m having and how they can be fixed while I’m away. 7/19/2006 Friends Drawn.
Here is tonight’s screen shot, as you can see the map is now drawing some of the other friends. This was pretty simple do with how I set up the draw text and circle code. The DrawFriends() method selects all friends that are parents in their relationships, or don’t have any relationships. Each person is then drawn on the map and after they drawn the code checks if they have any children and if they do the child friend is drawn, which then checks if that child has any friends, this is done using recursion and allows an infinite amount of relationships, in case you wanted to track a few hundred generations of family?
Another major development from last night’s screenshot is the circles and text looking 100% better. I was talking to a friend this morning and he gave me some tips on how to make it look better. By using the following two lines.
g.SmoothingMode = System.Drawing.Drawing2D.SmoothingMode.AntiAlias; g.TextRenderingHint = System.Drawing.Text.TextRenderingHint.AntiAlias;
This applies Anti Aliasing to the drawn shapes and lines and the drawn text. Anti Aliasing makes the drawn text and circles look smoother by removing the ‘jaggies’ or sharp edges. How does it do it? Magic. Pure unadulterated magic. Wikipedia may be more correct than I am though, so if you want to know I’d suggest you go here.
I’d also like to retract something I said yesterday, you can make a rectangle with out using integers. RectangleF is the object you use for that. I should pressed the down key a few more times :)
So now that friends are being drawn on the map what next? I need to fix a small but annoying problem I’m having with the drawing of the control. If there are too many friends to display the map continues trying to draw them and giving the user the too popular message, over and over again. I’ve tried setting variables so it isn’t displayed any more and I’ve tried only displaying it once the map has finished drawing, but it’s coming up multiple times for reason. I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of time on a problem that should be simple. Once I’ve nailed that down I’ll start adding links between the circles, I think this part of the application will be the most troublesome. If I can get this part finished before I go away I’ll be very happy. 7/18/2006 Too Popular!
Linked above is the latest screenshot of my application, similar to yesterdays except the text positioning has been fixed up (though it’s still a little buggy) and there are multiple circles with my name in it, why? I’m really popular with my self as the message box says.
What the screenshot is really demonstrating is code to determine when the map can not draw any fit any more circles in it. Usually these would be friend circles but I’ve not got that far yet and just created an event to draw the owner circle multiple times. I didn’t get much besides this done today, I spent far too long doing my head in thinking about I can check if a circle is intersecting another circle. Which annoyed me because the answer was really simple; I’m not sure why I didn’t come up with it sooner.
The DrawEllipse() method can take a rectangle to draw the ellipse in. For me it’s a lot easier to work out if a square is over lapping another square, especially when the squares are in a rectangular container, so this is the solution I used. At the moment a circle is 20% of the original panel width, the space between circles is the circle width / 2. After each circle is drawn the coordinates for the next circle are updated, if the previous circle is at X, Y the next circle has to be at (X + circle size + ½ circle size), Y unless that X coordinate (plus a circle) is greater than the panel width. In that case the coordinates need to be X, (Y + circle size + ½ circle size). This fell into place when I realised circles could be represented by squares.
One thing I found a little annoying was that when creating a rectangle it couldn’t take float values for the size. So there is a bit of casting and rounding going on to get integers out of floats. So when I say ½ circle size I really mean Math.Round(circle size / 2, 0);.
Today was pretty successful, even though I didn’t accomplish what I set out to achieve (drawing friends on the map). I’ll attempt to get friends drawn on the map tomorrow if time is on my side. Speaking of time I’ll be taking some out Sunday and Monday, I’m having a mini holiday to the south west of Western Australia which will be extremely relaxing, so no blog entries on those days. :) 7/17/2006 Application Screenshot.
It’s all coming together; well at least the screen shot makes it appear that way. I didn’t get much time after work today to get much done. Though I did some design on paper to work out exactly what I needed to create and how that should be done. I’m still a little unclear on a few things, but I’ll get there in the end. One other part of the design of the control I did today was creating the formulae (formulas? www.dictionary.com says both are acceptable.) for ranking friends and events, they (especially the friends formula) could use some fine tuning, and who knows I might change it entirely before I actually implement it :)
The actual implementation of the friend map control is similar to the code I posted yesterday. Except here I have the panel’s paint method calling other methods to draw the individual parts. Drawing friends and links between people is going to be a fairly involved process and putting it all in the panel’s paint method would be messy to say the least.
Tomorrow I plan on cleaning up the code so the text in the initial circle is drawn in the middle and fixing a few other things (at the moment my name is hard coded, I’ll change that to dynamic tomorrow). Once I’m happy with that I’ll begin adding code for drawing the circles of other friends. I’m thinking of selecting all friends from the friends table that don’t have links, or are parents in their links and then one by one draw each friend on the map, and if they have links draw their links. I’m not quite sure how I’ll make the map look pretty with out having circles or links between friends over lapping each other and I’m sure I’ll run into quite a few issues I’m not yet aware about. So we’ll see where I’m at tomorrow. |
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