I recently saw a post in an MS newsgroup and as I had an example that I wrote earlier, I just thought I’d make it available. What this does is simple: it implements custom handling of the non-client area of a window. The non-client area is, normally, the area of a window that is not part of the client area (duh!), like that used for adornments, window buttons, borders, that kind of thing. While the user moves the mouse over a window’s area, Windows sends messages to figure out which part of the …

In two previous posts (here and here) I have previously posted about how to draw rubber band selection rectangles similar to what Explorer does. Now a reader contacted me by email and asked for an extension: he wants to have a reverse selection, similar to this image:

No problem, of course :-)

I started out from the improved version of the first demo and made a few changes — all you have to do is replace the `SelectionPanel.OnP …

In a newsgroup I replied to a question about calculating average data throughput during data reception over the network. A simple average bytes per second calculation needs only a few lines of code:

int bytesTotal = 0;
int bytesPerSecond = 0;
DateTime startTime = DateTime.Now;

do {
  bytesRead = receiveStream.Read( ... );
  bytesTotal += bytesRead;
  bytesPerSecond = bytesTotal / (DateTime.Now - startTime).TotalSeconds;

  ...
} while(bytesRead > 0);

The problem with this is th …

This is the eighth article in my mini series about object pooling. Be sure to read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6 and part 7 first. So, although the number of downloads of the sample program hasn’t been exactly great, I’m finally continuing the series. As I said in a previous article, I’d like to factor out the resizing behaviour — but before I do that, I want to integrate functionality that’ll let me evaluate the pool’s performance with regard to resizing, so I can assess the …

Just saw this post in a newsgroup about how to show the horizontal lines that Microsoft likes to use in their dialogs. A lot of people replied with ideas of using other controls, like panels, to achieve the desired effect — to me, a much simpler and more effective idea is to just create a control myself. So, the specific style described by the OP seems to be this:

This is what you get by using a label set to a height of 2 and with a _BorderSt …

This is the seventh article in my mini series about object pooling. Be sure to read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 and part 6 first. As some of you may have noticed, I introduced a bad bug in the last article about growing and shrinking, specifically in the code that would call the ExtendPoolBy and ShrinkPoolBy methods. The amount by which to grow or shrink the pool was calculated as the difference between two percentage figures and passed in to the two methods, which really expecte …

This is the sixth article in my mini series about object pooling. Be sure to read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5 first. It took me a while to find the time for the next article, but here it is. Now we’re finally going to deal with the topic of growing and shrinking the pool. One of the first questions we have to ask when it comes to this is, when are we going to do it? We have one mechanism for growing the pool implemented already, which takes place when, during a call to the `GetObj …

This is the fifth article in my mini series about object pooling. Be sure to read part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4 first. This part is going to make some modifications to the code in the GetObject method to implement various alternative behaviours there. Think about it: what do you want to happen if there’s no free object to be had in the pool? I came up with the following possible options:

1. Return null. In this case, the caller would have to deal with the problem further if it can’t ge …