James Woodall

Coupling..the end of?

Last night the last (i think) episode of coupling was aired on BBC 3 (UK).  The ending was very well tied off and there are a few suprises.  For those of you unaware of Coupling, it was first shown here in 2000 and has become one of our popular comedies.  It went over to the USA on BBC America and became so popular that a remake was decided.  Unfortunately it was proved to be a flop (the remake) but the original still rode on to produce more episodes. 

Why many English shows are remade for american audiences is beyond me, most of them seem to flop anyway even though the originals do so well in the states (The Weakest Link, Coupling, Faulty Towers all failed but are all really popular in their original format) but at least Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire seems to have done well over there.

If you have access to BBC America (or BBC 3) then watch this final episode, it was brilliant.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/coupling/
http://www.bbcamerica.com/genre/comedy_games/coupling/coupling.jsp

ToolTask V1.2 BETA

I know it hasn't been long since Version 1.1 but 1.2 is now around the corner and it looks like it is going to be a bigger one than the previous.

This version comes with support for other software apart from Microsoft Outlook so will require more substantial testing.  I also plan to release the source-code for 1.2 so it needs to be very stable.

Please can you register your interest and support by email me at <ADDRESS REMOVED DUE TO MOUNTAINS OF SPAM!!!>

Many thanks

James

ToolTask V1.1

ToolTask Version 1.1 is now complete and is ready to download from Here.

Version 1.1 includes the new history feature that allows you to easily revisit pages that were recently 'Tasked'.
Edit: This version also included the Comment feature that can be applied to any task

IE ToolBand Custom Control Issues

I decided to add a drop-down button to ToolTask. Realising I would have to write this manually (the ToolBarButton only exists within a ToolBar control) I started off by implementing it into a simple Form and then plan to just add it to my DeskBand control like any other control.  After a while I completed this and it worked fine under the Form but as soon as it was hosted in IE things started to go wrong!

The button consists of 2 buttons, a Text button and a Drop-Down button.  The idea being that when the mouse hovers over the entire control the state should be 'hot'.  For some reason the mouse enter and leave events (while hosted in Internet Explorer) were being thrown in a different order to when it was running under the simple form.  This meant that when the mouse moved from one section to the other there were major state drawing issues (half hot, half not).

There is no logical explanation to this so I had to write a messy hack which now gives some flicker when the mouse moves from one section to the other.

If anybody else has had any problems with ToolBands hosted in Internet Explorer please reply.

ToolTask

This is just a filler for the category 'ToolTask' in my blog.

ToolTask is an Internet Explorer plugin to allow people to set themselves reminders to view webpages.  It was written because I kept on forgetting what I needed to read and when.  Since 'favorites' is only basic I needed a better implementation.

It uses concepts and code defined in http://www.thecodeproject.com/csharp/dotnetbandobjects.asp but I am slowly drifting away from this code with subsquent releases.

The source code will be released eventually but needs tidying up at the moment.

Please see http://www.jwsoft.co.uk/ToolTask for more information

Borland adventures

On my daily trawl of the web I came across the Borland equivalent of Microsoft C# IDE.  Having played around with the free personal edition it made me ponder whether people actually use this?  Don't get me wrong, it is a good IDE and also free (personal non-commercial edition), but do people actually use the full version in the commercial market? 

I can see why anti-Microsoft people would use Borlands other products (C Builder for example) but since C# is a Microsoft language I don't think that argument is valid.