|
I'm getting ready to release a new version of a WinForms app that's been on my site for about six months. I lost the source code when my laptop died ( two drives in a striped raid configuration ) so this is more of a rewrite than a few improvements. As I'm getting ready to finish this, I'm putting a few new features in there, and wonder if people have any advice on how to implement them?
First there's a button on the toolbar to visit my web site; this works by calling System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("http://forrestcroce.com"). On my system, FireFox opens a new tab and navigates to the URL. Is there anything I can do to make these visits easier to identify in my web stats? This will come up under direct / type-in, but I already get a decent amount of that type of traffic.
What's the best way to persist data to XML? I've found that XML Serialization is faster and uses less memory than ADO.NET ( building then writing out an arbitrary DataSet ), but the XML that serialization produces looks horrible. A serialized DataSet is very easy to edit in Notepad, or some other application, even for people who don't really understand XML. Thing is, I'm not using System.Data anywhere else in the application, so loading it just to make prettier XML seems wasteful. ( For the record, I don't need to store more than a few KB of data. )
Less important, but maybe someone has figured this out already ... I'm using VS 2005, which comes with a lot of icons and 16x16 bitmaps that use magenta for transparency. The ToolStrip works beautifully with these, but if you make a SplitButton, its menu items display the magenta, and it looks awful.
Finally, the program works on a series of images, pulling out their metadata. In the process, it can create thumbnails, and when it's read all of the images, it can export html, csv, and xml representations of the metadata. One improvement I'm working on is better and more html exporting. Would people approach that by building a template system, or XSLT?
Thanks!
|
