Woot

After being absent for more than a year, I finally come back and posting here. When the last time I write here, and come back, I'm in the same company, but already resign and reapply back. Talk about destiny, huh? But of course my job title is better now, compared to last time I write here. There's a lot of event that happened within that time in my life. From career, collage, and even life and love story.

First of all, I finally made it in my collage. I graduate last month and earn a title of Master. Its been hell a lot of time to finish it, since my most problem is the difficulty of that final project that I have to finish. And the topic is the one that I bad at. Its the UML. At first, my decision to use this method was because maybe I can learn something new. But that was my biggest mistake of all. Its all pain in each chapter. But I'm glad I've been through that.

My career improved a lot better this time. I rejoin company that I work before, with a new title as IT Manager now. So I got bigger responsibility to do than my previous title. Its tough job to do, but I believe I can do my best to help this company grow from IT side.

Last event that happened was I lost the girl that I love so much. During my little sister problem, I got confused and have many to think about and apparently can't give her attention to win her heart. I admit that was terrible, since I moved on her a bit fast and didn't consider about my family condition at that time. Do I still have 2nd chance to start it over? I do hope I can and I'll try to fix my relationship with her when she come back to this city (yes, she's at other city at the moment). I've had many new girl friends since that day (the day that she "did" that to me), but my feelings towards her is still the same. Hmm, so many things to tell, but maybe I'll write later if I feel the mood. Hey, its not easy to write it all, I'm not a writer, so don't expect much, OK.. ^^

My web browsers

Currently, I have used 2 web browser simultaneity. Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and Mozilla Firefox 2.x.x (FF). Those two browsers did their jobs very well, and I'm still using them until this day. Despite many article war between these two by fanboys (I hate them..), IE7 and FF each one has its advantage and disadvantage.

Internet Explorer 7

I use IE on many ASP or ASP.NET site, which I know, Microsoft technology indeed has most compatibility each others. From my knowledge, IE7 has better support on CSS than Firefox, but in fact, I don't even bother since I don't really care about CSS stuffs. Many has said IE has lack of security, but for me, not this version. It has better security than previous one, embedded phishing filter (which I don't feel the difference if I don't use it), and one of the reasons, is a nice and better UI than FF. I usually use IE7 for navigate to Microsoft sites or development sites like Codeproject, Codeplex, etc. I also use this browser if I want to see a flash content of a site. I let windows update to manage updates for this browser.

Mozilla Firefox 2.x.x

Word to describe this broser: ADBlock Plus, NoScript and Load Images. I used ADBlock and NoScript recently and amazed about this plugin can do. Block those annoying advertisement or useless script about 90% of the time. Great plugin, especially when you're at a forum which has many advertisement content like Kaskus. For me, that site contain too much advertising and all of the are annoying. With this plug in, I've never encounter that problem again. The other future that I like is its abilities to block image only from selected sites. This help me a lot, rather than keep change settings when I browsing the net. It's lack support of activeX makes this browser save for some "dark" sites.

Browser war and fanboyism

With IE7 and FF currently dominate market share, it didn't surprised that there's a lot of debate to find out which one is the best. For me, neither two of them. Each browser has come with its advantages. It depends on how far a user will use this tools.

VB Code Formatter Plug-in for Windows Live Writer

Refer to my post yesterday, I've found a new plug-in for Windows Live Writer (WLW), that can paste my Visual Basic Source Code and keep it's format. I've test some codes, and it seems works fine for me.

Here's a sample:

VB Code

Public Shared Function NumberToEnglishWords(ByVal num As Long) As String Return NumberToEnglishWords(num, 0) End Function

Other features that seems great is the ability to add line number, which I'm still can't decide whether I should use it or not. The plug-in is made with C# and it's open source. I'd like to learn the source when I have a spare time.

At the first look (in Live Writer editor), the table border width is not quite right. I'll look the result after I post this on my blog.

This plug-in was made by Steve Dunn. You can visit his blog here, while the article about the plug-in can be found here.

Windows Live Writer

I've finished download and installed Windows Live Writer. I use version 1.0. Actually I want to download the newest live writer, but it seems Microsoft didn't provide direct link with it. Sucks.

My first impression using this tool is good. It has spell check, Nice layout. But actually, that's not important to me. All I want is a style that can post source code without messing them.

Well, let's try it:

Code

Public Shared Sub DrawNonRectangleBorder(ByVal g As Graphics, ByVal borderColor As Color, _                                          ByVal angle As Integer, ByVal rect As Rectangle)     Using pth As New Drawing2D.GraphicsPath         pth.AddLine(angle, 0, rect.Width - angle - 1, 0)         pth.AddLine(rect.Width - 1, angle, rect.Width - 1, rect.Height - angle - 1)         pth.AddLine(rect.Width - angle - 1, rect.Height - 1, angle, rect.Height - 1)         pth.AddLine(0, rect.Height - angle - 1, 0, angle)         pth.CloseAllFigures()         g.SmoothingMode = Drawing2D.SmoothingMode.AntiAlias         g.DrawPath(New Pen(borderColor), pth)     End Using End Sub

 

Ok. First testing, it has one big disadvantage than Office 2007. When I copy source code directly from VS IDE, the font color didn't change. That's a big drawback to me. In Office 2007, it copies all styles, including font color. Unfortunately, the table messed up after I post. For now, let's see the final result first...

Back to blog

After 5 months absent, I start to write the blog again. Now, I know, writing a blog is not an easy task. You should know how to explain/describe, express something in your mind, or even tell some strories or experience to the readers. Well, writing a blog is easy, but to write a GOOD article or blog need more effort than just writing. Heck, I event don't know whether I spelled my english perfectly in this blog, since blogger editor didn't contain spell check. Maybe because I use IE 7 for posting blog, since Firefox contain spell check by default. For some reason, I still not trust firefox right now. And don't ask me why. It's hard to explain.

For now, I'll try more active in writing blog. I hope this will horn my skills in writing and describing, so I can make a good speech in the future :p...

By the way, I will leave Office 2007 for posting a blog due to some trouble I have with it. The table still sucks. If the table still sucks, I won't be able to post the code in this blog. So, I'll try another tools for posting the blog (And I don't like blogger default editor too. Heh..heh..). One tool that pop in my head is Live Writer...

Creating Component with Rich Design Time Support

These 2 weeks had been most exhausted event for my brain. While researching designer class, I found something new and yet confusing methods to study. Design time component has a very wide scope to begin with, and it seems like one method can spread to another method. Sometimes I can be very frustrating. Once I got a small solution or step, that step always connects to another 2 or 3 problem that had to be solved. I wonder how much time I have to spend to complete my current home project. Luckily, my work had been on simulation stage, which mean, I have more spare time to observe and studying articles while doing a little design to my next project. Now I start wonder, since I have to put a lot of effort to my home project, maybe I should start to commercialize it? It maybe worth some money.

Adorners and Glyphs

Currently, I've studied a bit about Adorner. With Adorners and Glyph, you can give full design time support for making some good components, especially such as multi tab component. I'm telling you, learning this stuff is more complicated than I expected. The concept is difficult as well. Much more difficult for a man who only have one year experience with .NET Framework. Now I feel sorry for being ignorance when .NET released. Too late for that now.

After a few days of learning and observing various codes, I learn that to fully support design time component, I must include some service before applying adorner and glyph. Adorner itself are is part of behavior service. Luckily, those services come from base class, if you inherit designer class to a ControlDesigner class. Base on that base class, you may add an adorner which contains any glyph which will represent your child control (it's an array). One note if you work with this, make sure you override dispose method which is removing your glyph from adorner. If you forgot to do this, the glyph will likely stay even when you remove the component and closing the form. The possible solution that I found is to close your IDE, and start it over again (and of course, override its dispose method).

I know it's a bit confusing if you read this post, but hey, I'm confused too. I'll try to hang out with this for a while, and once I fully understand about the concept, I'll try to make a new component that utilizes Adorner and Glyphs. I'll post some article about making this component too. So keep your eyes open for another updates in this blog and my vbcorner tutorial blog.