Monthly archives: January 2005


Worst update so far

Today’s Ascii Generator programming time was partly spent trying to work out why the .NET Wizard would let me create any type of new project except for the new C# Windows Application project I wanted, and the rest was spent reinstalling .NET.

In summary – AscgendotNet status: unchanged. Current book I’m reading status: ahead of schedule.


Update

The new picturebox is nearly finished. Just need to add in one more thing which will greatly increase the drawing speed for large images.
FXCop compliance is just about done so the code is nice and tight.
As a bonus it’s forced me to add the framework for localization. Once the program is far enough along it’ll be easy to add other languages.
Enabled XP styles, so the program looks all nice and fancy.

To do next:
Port the conversion code.
Selection of an area of the image – Will probably add it into the new PictureBox control.
Come up with a better way for the user to change brightness/contrast values. Probably writing a custom version of the vertical scroll bars to add the current value and display it with some nice graphics.
Removal of FormText and redesign of the main form to add the converted text onto a new tab.


I suck at blogging

I really do. Work on the new Ascgen took a break, but I’ve started up again and I’ll try and keep this updated.

Current goals:

    Inherited version of the PictureBox class, adding brightness, contrast, interpolation mode, load, and some other things that Microsoft should have put in before they ever released it. (Nearly complete)
    FXCop compliance. (Almost)
    Porting over the original conversion code
    Working out an accurate way to get the dimensions of a character when displayed in a font. 😐

Answers to common questions:

    Versions for other operating systems will hopefully be available through the Mono project
    Colour pictures would require a totally different approach, and probably won’t be added. With the pictures the Ascgen produces each character represents a different gray colour without needing any extra processing. For colour images, each character is set to a colour with html/rtf/etc and the character itself is irrelevant.
    This will probably go open source when it’s at a stable working build. Until then, please don’t ask for the code.

😕 I’ll think of more later…