So I've heard lots about this "immediate window" thing from VB land, but I must admit that I don't know very much about it or when it's used. My understanding is that it's basically a place for you to input expressions which are then evaluated and displayed. So if I put 2+2, it would show me 4. Is that about it? Basically, can someone give me the quick and dirty information about what an immediate window does and why one uses it, as well as some real life examples?
December 2006 Archives
Lis and I made it home safely. We drove for about a total of 24 hours in the last two days, so it's bedtime now.
I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season, no matter what you celebrate (if you celebrate). I had a really nice time this year. It was my first Christmas away from family, so it was a bit strange not to do my usual Christmas traditions. But it was fun seeing how Elissa's family does things. On Christmas Eve, all of Lis' extended family gathered to exchange gifts and hang out. It was really odd -- her extended family comfortably fits inside of a living room! But everyone was really nice and we had a blast. I shot my first handgun,
So 3shost ate my previous post (and destroyed some previously working settings), so this is my third shot at telling you about the new magnification APIs available in Vista. Basically, the idea is that the system provides the user with a set of uniform APIs that allows them to magnify a part of the screen (usually for accessibility purposes). You might think that this process is relatively difficult -- but it's really quite easy. You first have to initialize the magnification services with a call to MagInitialize. Then you create your magnification control with CreateWindow, and set up the magnification
Just an FYI, Ramblings is having some major problems. Earlier today, my totally awesome post about the new magnification APIs in Vista was eaten when I went to post it. Now, my previously published post (whining about how I hadn't updated in forever) is gone as well. Even though I'm in Texas (and having a blast), Adam and I are working to get the sites moved over. Hopefully in the next few days (assuming that Adam and I have the time to do it).
Oh man, it's been a good week for announcements! Raymond Chen has written a book, which is something I (along with most of the Win32 programming world) have been longing for. Then I wake up today to find out that Microsoft has announced the dates for PDC 2007. No information on content or costs, but the dates are a good start. :-) So yeah, that's two items which make this geek very happy. I'm hoping to get that book very early next year, and spend some time congratulating Raymond in person at PDC later in the year. :-) An item
While the weather is still miserable around here (it's been raining. RAINING! In December! In MN! Who says there's no global warming?), today's at least been a much more productive day than yesterday. After my bout with apathy yesterday, I watched Raging Bull and Samurai 7, and had a nice chat with Lis. Then went to bed. I woke up this morning with a few ideas on how to tackle a long-standing annoyance with the menu editor: scrolling. You see, the original designer of that piece of code assumed that most people would have normal-sized menus. So the menu editor
Yup, that's right. I'm suffering from a case of the Mondays -- must be all those TPS reports. I woke up this morning sleepy, and I've yet to fully revive into awakefullness. The day just sorta went ennuihill from there. Hmm, at least I accomplished something today: I made up two new words. You'll never guess what they were. :-P I got some bugs fixed, which is always a good thing. However, barring those strange events, I've just not been able to pull myself out of this funk to feel productive. Today's been a grey, overcast day outside, with a
Well, this weekend's been rather busy, but still an enjoyable one. On Friday night, Lou came over for a short while to have a very distracted nerd night. He brought his girlfriend's baby along, who spent most of the evening crying. Always a blast. :-P But we still got some good games of Mario Kart 64 taken care of. I still enjoy Wario's Stadium the most; you can hop that wall at the starting point and get some fantastic times. I think my record is something like 20-30 seconds for a single lap. Heh! After Lou left (which was rather
It's going to be a busy weekend for Aaron, let me tell you (in the third person, no less)! I have a lunch date today with mom (in about an hour) to go eat some awesome pizza from the Green Mill in St Cloud. We might exchange vehicles since the family wants to go get a Christmas tree this weekend, and I'm the only one in the family with a truck anymore. But they were also talking about just strapping it to the top of mom's Rav4, so who knows. Then tonight is supposed to be a nerd night with
I make plenty of use of my quick launch bar on Windows. It holds all of my most often accessed applications so that I don't have to monkey around with the start button. Granted, the new start button's functionality widely negates my need for the quick launch bar (since it keeps a recent applications list for me). But I still make use of it. It currently holds shortcuts to: FireFox, Snipping Tool, Thunderbird, DebugView, Magnifier, MSDN and TextPad. However, there's one thing which really annoys me about the bar: it doesn't work how I want it to with regards to
(By way of Aaron Brethorst's blog) Vista ships with a nice little utility which Mac users have had for a long time -- an application responsible for doing screen captures. It's called the Snipping Tool, and you can access it by typing in "snippingtool" in the start menu. On Windows, you can do two different types of screen captures, both relying on the Print Screen button. If you hit just Print Screen, then you'll get the entire monitor captured. If you hold down Alt when hitting Print Screen, then the currently focused window is captured. In either case, the captured
I've been collecting these for a while, and I think it's time to put them on display for all to appreciate. Here's the inner-workings of a twisted mind. ;-) Your challenge is to come up with funny language concepts of your own! Something the Random module is missing: [rbcode] Sub Crash(extends r as Random) #pragma NilObjectChecking false if r.Number dim p as Ptr p.Int32( 0 ) = 0 end if End Sub[/rbcode] Since there's the goto statement that lets you jump from one code locality to another via label, why not the comefrom statement? It lets you jump back. In
One of the things I was thinking about was a way to add watchpoints to the REALbasic debugger. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, a watchpoint is a handy debugging feature whereby you can have the debugger "watch" a particular variable so that when it's changed, the debugger breaks at that point. So let's say you have an overly complex application, and somewhere in your code base, something is setting a variable to the incorrect value. You know that when the window opens, everything is fine, but between the window opening and when you push a particular button,
That's the long and short of it. Worst. Football. "Team." Ever. So in my opinion, Minnesota shouldn't even have a football team anymore. They're too much of a disappointment -- we have enough of those as it stands (anyone watched the Twins in the last few years?). (Can you tell the Vikes are playing for crap today and I'm annoyed?) In other news, I've been making good strides with my trucker application. It's almost entirely functional with my Ford, so I've started working on my Dodge next. Having some problems with the Dodge, but mostly due to bad protocol information.
One of the areas of the IDE which I've never really had a lot of comfort with has always been the debugger. The code is rather complex, and spans a huge number of classes and layouts. I've always been a bit intimated to get into the code, but at the same time, I've also always wanted to fully understand it so that I could extend it. You see, I use the debugger so freaking much and there are so many things I'd love it to be able to do. However, unless I just get my hands dirty and go do
