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Re: An administrative console Part III... [message #12031 is a reply to message #12027]

Tue, 09 October 2007 01:46

tvanriper
Messages: 85
Registered: September 2007
Location: Germantown, MD, USA

Member

Oh, yeah, I forgot to point out some other nice implementation details that might help tempt someone to consider this toolkit...

All the graphics you see in this project are embedded in the executable, using bz2 compression to help keep the file size small. I think the executable is only around 2 megs, total; the download is about 3 megs, if I recall... much of which involves the bitmaps that had to be embedded in the MSI installer.

Ultimate++ makes doing that sort of thing exceedingly trivial; a single file with some simple instructions causes the graphics to get embedded. Then, it's some fairly simple code to extract and decode them into Image classes (although I could have embedded anything in the executable). I think I'm using PNG and JPG file formats; the RTX logo in the lower left corner of the Systems tab is a PNG with a transparent background, allowing it to float over the big textured gray background. It was anti-aliased against a gray background, so it looks as if it's anti-aliased against the texture gray background (but it wasn't).

The login's dropdown is actually a WithDropChoice-style control that makes use of History. I store the History and tab selection in a .cfg file using Ultimate++'s streaming file capabilities to keep things pretty simple. Unfortunately, since I'm using 2007.1, the .CFG is located in the same folder as the executable... eventually, I'll move to the newer toolkit, and move the .cfg into the user's personal folder instead. But, at least I didn't have to use any registry settings (except for the one COM component I needed to install).

Can I remember where I had to customize U++?

1. The string edit control, so I could take advantage of using different colors, textures, or whatever for the text and paper of the control.

2. The tab control, to make it possible to have white text for the tabs (originally, I could only have black text, which against these bitmaps is illegible).

I made a third change, but I can't recall where. Perhaps if I have some time tomorrow, I'll look it up and report what I changed. Maybe it had something to do with the date/time control, but I'm not sure... I recall having had some problems there.

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