I'm very proud of my big sister, who was one of 16 teachers picked as the Los Angeles County teacher of the year. To put this into perspective, there are over 80,000 teachers in LA County, and she was one of sixteen to win. Very freakin awesome! I went to the banquet last Friday honoring these teachers, and had a really nice time. It was held at the Hilton in Universal City, and took pretty much the entire day. There was a media event (my sis was on TV and in the newspapers!), as well as an awards ceremony, etc.
September 2007 Archives
I ran into a difference between MemoryBlock and Ptr today, so I figured it'd make for a nice blog posting. dim w, w2 as WString dim mb as MemoryBlock = somePtr w = mb.WString( 0 ) w2 = somePtr.WString( 0 ) You'd think that w and w2 would be the same WString, but alas, they are not. Ptr.WString takes the memory location at the offset given, dereferences it, and starts grabbing UTF-16 data until it hits a null character. MemoryBlock.WString uses the memory block's start adress plus the offset given and starts grabbing UTF-16 data until it hits a null
Last time we made our first attempt at a COM object in REALbasic. It was a successful attempt, but it was a rather ugly implementation. Today we're going to go over some techniques for a less discongruous manner of implementing COM objects. The key to making things as OOP as possible (I never realized OOP was an adjective, did you?) is a feature from 2007r3: namespaces. A lot of people don't see the purpose to them, but by the time you're done reading this blog post, you'll see just how clean they can make your code. We're going to continue
When we last left off, you were learning the boring pieces to what a COM object really is. Today, you're going to apply that knowledge and see how to create a COM object in REALbasic using nothing but pure RB code. We're going to accomplish that by picking a relatively easy COM object (IProgressDialog) and exposing it as a REALbasic object. However, I want to be up front with the fact that what we will accomplish today is a very crude implementation, and certainly not one you would want to mimic. So, what is an IProgressDialog? Well, as the name
So in my last entry, I teased you with a hint that you can now work with COM using pure REALbasic code. Today, I'm going to tease you a bit more. ;-) Before you can understand how to write COM code from REALbasic, you must first understand the basics of COM. Otherwise, none of it will make any sense. COM stands for Component Object Model, which is basically a fancy way of saying "generic object." REALbasic has its own object model, and C++ has an object model, as does C#, etc. What makes COM special is the fact that it
Oh boy am I stoked about delegates! Aaron + Delegates = COM support. Yes, that's right... COM support. I've already done a proof of concept application which sets the desktop wallpaper via the IActiveDesktop COM object. I've also demonstrated some more complex stuff with a BITS implementation using IBackgroundCopyManager, et al. The next tricky part is finding a reasonable way to automate the process so that you don't have to do a lot of the tedious work by hand. And believe me, it is tedious. However, it is possible, and that's the important thing. Delegates rock, plain and simple. Hopefully,
This one came in via email by way of Christopher, and I thought it might be a nice topic to discuss today: So I was thinking about how other developers think.. I seem to remember a post on the forums a while back along the same lines.. I find others thought processes interesting.. So I thought it might make a good blog post for you when you can't think of anything to write about.. Things like how you start to tackle a problem/project.. Do you jump right in or mull it over? Do you find yourself looking up API a
