Mike's Musings » .Net http://mlowen.com Do you want code with that mongoose? Sun, 26 Sep 2010 05:18:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/nz/ Weekend of Code http://mlowen.com/2010/09/10/weekend-of-code/ http://mlowen.com/2010/09/10/weekend-of-code/#comments Fri, 10 Sep 2010 11:39:06 +0000 Mike http://mlowen.com/?p=136 I found that for me this weekend is going to be a bit of a quiet affair so rather than sitting around all day doing not very much I decided that I’d try to be productive.  It’s been a while since I sat down and done any meaningful amount of coding for myself so I thought that is where I’d start, my next question was what do I want to write? I then remembered that I’m not overly fond of most of the music players that I’ve tried on Windows, the closest so far to something I find acceptable is iTunes.  With that I had it: my goal for this weekend would be to write (or at least make a dent in writing) a music player that I would like.

Alright, that’s all fine and dandy to say but what does that actually mean? Brainstorming it I came up with seven key features that I want in my media player:

  • Only plays music, doesn’t try to do anything else.
  • Watch folders.
  • Filter on album, artist, title.
  • Filter a filter.
  • Ability to queue songs while on shuffle.
  • Playlists.
  • A similar interface to iTunes.

While watching Justice League: The New Frontier tonight I made a bit of start by making some rough UI mock-ups in Balsamiq.

To implement this I’m planning on using C# and WPF, I haven’t had a good chance to play around with WPF or some of the new Windows 7 features that are available so I figured this would be as good a time as any.  Finally my other goal with this project is an attempt to get me back into blogging, to that end I will hopefully be making a post at the end of each day summarizing what I’ve done – possibly with some screenshots.  Until then I should be posting some updates to my twitter feed.

]]> http://mlowen.com/2010/09/10/weekend-of-code/feed/ 2 What happened to Cuttlefish? http://mlowen.com/2009/02/03/what-happened-to-cuttlefish/ http://mlowen.com/2009/02/03/what-happened-to-cuttlefish/#comments Tue, 03 Feb 2009 05:03:14 +0000 Mike http://mlowen.com/?p=61 Close to a month ago now I wrote about what I got up to on my holiday and I said I had started a new project Cuttlefish – a syntax highlighting text box for .Net. I also said that I would post about in more depth later, so far that hasn’t happened. This is mostly because I haven’t actually finished cuttlefish and I haven’t a lot of time to code lately. The other big reason is I recently picked up a copy of Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries and found that my little project needs a quite a bit of refactoring to be compliant with these guidelines. I hope to get started on the compliance work tonight, once that refactoring is done it shouldn’t take to long to finish it off. With all that in mind it hopefully won’t be to long before I am able to show cuttlefish off.

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