Entries for Soviut

will "ringing" phones become obsolete? [will "ringing" phones become obsolete?]

Soviut — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 20:09:12 GMT

I work at an animation studio. I'm one of about 2 and a half developers in a company of 100 people or so. We don't get many calls, people usually just walk over and ask us questions or give us requests.

So when the phone rang just now I joked out loud "what the hell was that?! Did you guys hear something? It sounded like some kind of ringtone".

It got me wondering. With all the new music ringtones and different tone sequences that cells have today, is the traditional "ring" going to become obsolete. I mean, I already kind of associate a phone call with the default Nokia ring now.

Junk food for thought.

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Extend Listbox with an Image datamember [Extend Listbox with an Image datamember]

Soviut — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 05:38:44 GMT

I've created a simple extended version of the ListBox winforms control. It overrides the OnDrawItem event and draws an image thumbnail and title in the item bounds.

What I'd like to be able to do is bind this to a data source, in this case a List<T> of objects I have. The catch is, I'd basically like to specify two ValueMembers. One would be bound to the Image property in my datasource, the other would be bound to the Title property.

I'm having trouble figuring out how to add another property to do this, what the attribute flags for properties need to be and such. I'm pretty novice when it comes to reflection, and control databinding seems to be a bit of a black box in most cases. Any information or links would be more than welcome.

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OR mappers, got any favourites? [OR mappers, got any favourites?]

Soviut — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 03:09:53 GMT

With the upcoming DLINQ and other LINQ technologies, Microsoft is coming up with an elegant OR mapping solution of their own. However, until .NET 3.0/3.5 becomes mainstream enough (1-2 years) there are existing OR mappers (NHibernate, Neo, etc.) to choose from.

I'm currently developing with NHibernate as part of an R&D project at the animation studio I work at. The application is an extension of asset manager and, when complete, will use NHibernate to adapt the exisiting database, share tables (Users, Episodes, Shots, Comments, etc.) as well as access its own specific tables. In other words, its a new application with legacy ties.

The pros of NHibernate are the relative ease of use once everything is configured and mapped. The cons are that it can take a long time to get configured correctly. Benefits like self-management, lazy-loading, and inheritance comprehension are just a few of the features that really have me hooked.

What I want to know is, what other OR mappers have Niners dealt with. Which did you like, which did you not like, which did you downright hate? Basically I'm curious to get a cross section of the OR mapping "market", if you will.

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Menu organization best practices [Menu organization best practices]

Soviut — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 14:47:20 GMT

This has always been one of those things that sticks in the back of my head when I'm designing menus for my winforms applications. How do I organize things that seem to belong to more than one menu.

For example, I have a layer manager in my application so I have several layer operations (Create, Move Up, Move Down, Delete, Properties) but I also have an "import layer" procedure that lets the user import a layer from a file. So theoretically its a File operation that should be under the File menu.

This is a fairly simple example that I can easily compromise on, but I've run into far deeper overlaps than this before and I'm wondering; Are there any good resources that explain the best practices for overlapping functionality and menu organization like this?

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