EVEMon

LINQPad is an awesome aide to .NET Developers. Written by Joseph Albahari of LinqBridge and the C# In a Nutshell series fame. LINQPad allows the developer to write, compile and run C# or VB.NET Expressions, Statements of Programs outside of Visual Studio. Everything I am going to show you in this post can be done with Visual Studio simply by wrapping the text in a new console application, and adding references to the DLLs. However I strongly encourage you to download LINQPad and give it a go. In the event you are using 64-bit windows and are still using LINQPad 2 you will need to download the x86 version of LINQPad 2, as all of the EVEMon assemblies are compiled for x86. If you have LINQPad 4 you don’t need to worry about. Assuming you have EVEMon installed, the first step is to load the EVEMon.Common.dll assembly into LINQPad: ...

Over the past three weeks I have discovered that many performance problems with Windows Forms applications are down to certain events being fired very rapidly, usually these are down to layout operations being triggered by updates to controls. Without the use of RedGate Software’s excellent performance profiler I have been forced back into the habit of temporarily peppering the code I suspect of being a problem with trace messages. For a while I was quite disorganised using trace messages such as “Entered SoAndSoMethod”, “OnSomeEvent Triggered”, etc. Over time I have settled into using the declaring class and method name to identify which method was being called. Thinking about it today I decided this was still too much work (yeah, I am that lazy), I wondered if System.Reflection could help me: ...

AutoEllipsis is a property introduced to System.Windows.Forms.Label with .NET 3.0, which in the event of the text overflowing the rendering rectangle of the Label will trim the end and add a Ellipsis ("…"), if this does occur the ToolTip for the label will also be set to the full (untrimmed text). Unfortunately this functionality is not available for ToolStripStatusLabel. To make things worse in the event the text overflows it disappears completely. This bug, oversight, feature or whatever you want to call it cause some confusion after the release of EVEMon 1.3.0.1912. Several people assumed the new more verbose status bar was broken, being empty and all. We put together a kludge fix, which would set the text and if it overflowed try to guess the length with Graphics.MeasureString. This worked fairly well, it cause some flickering when resizing the window and would leave a small gap on the right hand side of the StatusStrip. I knew there must be a better way, and seeing an article about the StringFormat class reminded me of the need to find it. Searching about a bit found me a post on Joel on Software, I refined the code a little and came up with this (which is basically identical to Tom’s solution): ...

One of our more regular contributors to EVEMon posted on our forums showing that the application was incapable of updating cached files (specifically images), after a bit testing I discovered the following Exception was being thrown when trying to overwrite the file in question: System.IO.IOException: The process cannot access the file 'path\filename' because it is being used by another process. at System.IO.__Error.WinIOError(Int32 errorCode, String maybeFullPath) at System.IO.File.InternalCopy(String sourceFileName, String destFileName, Boolean overwrite) at System.IO.File.Copy(String sourceFileName, String destFileName, Boolean overwrite) at EVEMon.Common.FileHelper.OverwriteOrWarnTheUser(String srcFileName, String destFileName) in EVEMon.Common\FileHelper.cs:line 108 at EVEMon.Common.FileHelper.OverwriteOrWarnTheUser(String destFileName, Func\`2 writeContentFunc) in EVEMon.Common\FileHelper.cs:line 82 at EVEMon.Common.Controls.CharacterPortrait.SavePortraitToCache(Image newImage) in EVEMon.Common\Controls\CharacterPortrait.cs:line 248 After a bit of searching around I discovered a post on StackOverflow identifying that System.Drawing.Bitmap(string filename) would lock the filename until the Bitmap was disposed of. The post presented a solution but no code, A bit of further searching confirmed my expectation that Image.FromFile(string filename) was subject to the same locking behaviour: ...

Within EVEMon we have started making heavy use of LINQBridge which uses Visual Studio 2008’s Multi-Targeting capabilities to allow a .NET 2.0 applications to use the compiler functionality of C# 3.0. This reduces our need to push EVEMon towards .NET 3.5, and simplifies our dependency stack for the end user (.NET 2.0 is pre-installed on Vista and above, .NET 3.5 is pre-installed in Windows 7 and above). One of the annoyances I have run into is every time there is a problem with a LINQ statement the debugger will stop in the LINQBridge project rather than EVEMon’s code; this usually tells you nothing useful forcing you to dig into the exception to find the stack trace to find out which line caused the exception. ...

I have been working on EVEMon for about two months now, taking on the responsibility of committing changes to the trunk, fixing bugs and adding new features. As a project I have been involved for several years submitting bug fixes and little features, it was down to my experiences with EVEMon that I decided to implement Subversion and Trac at work. Unfortunately the first time it came to me to be responsible for a release, it seemed to go terribly wrong. The updated installer worked fine, and it seemed initially there were no problems with the updated code base. However BattleClinic shortly went a little mad with bug reports similar to this one: ...