Computers & Programming

I redesigned the ball lift to have two lifting arms. The ball holding “claws” will intertwine to allow the ball to be picked out of the lower arm by the upper arm. This video shows one of the variations of the lift that I designed. I’m making small…

I just fixed a minor visual bug in the Linkage program. If a drawing connector draws for a while, it reaches a limit to the length of the path it can draw. It should just lose the earliest parts of the path, but the bug caused the drawing…

I am using a copy of the WrapPanel code mentioned in an earlier post. The wrap panel measures UIElement items and then adds columns as needed to hold all objects at their desired size. The flaw in the existing WrapPanel code is that there is no way to…

After my last post, I decided to write a WordPress plug-in that would upload text to a file and generate a script tag to use to reference that file in posts. This was just thrown together in an evening and most of the work was in learning how…

I want to store source code for blog posts within their own files. This will allow a user to download the file instead of trying to copy/paste the formatted code from within the blog post. Although I do exclude line numbers from the code, I still replace >,…

The Windows Store ScrollViewer XAML has a bug. It causes a visual error on the screen when the ScrollViewer has no scroll bars. I discovered this because I have a main page in my app that uses the Visual Studio provided framework for a tiled app. The main…

I have a Windows Store app written in C# that has some popups. These are Popup objects that work like modal dialog boxes. Mine are displayed as a band across the middle of the screen. The standard built-in on-screen keyboard (OSK) handling does not alter the position of…

In a C# Windows Store app that I am writing, I let the user tap a button and then I start a background task to do a bunch of work. While this working is being done, the user can see the results on-screen as they become available. But…

In the process of porting my Windows Phone code to Windows 8 (Store App), I came across this interesting problem. FrameworkElement FieldView = Field.getView( true ); ContentPanel.Children.Add( FieldView ); Panel theParent = VisualTreeHelper.GetParent(FieldView) as Panel; FrameworkElement theotherparent = (FrameworkElement)FieldView.Parent; When I call this code in the OnNavigatedTo event…

I just finished writing a small Windows Store app. It is a color mixing program that stands out because it includes an Alpha channel control. I downloaded someone else’s color mixer and was sadly disappointed. Their user interface had multiple preview boxes, and changing a setting in one…