Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Coding A Feature A Day

Most artist's blogs inevitably have an entry where they talk about drawing at least one picture a day, just to keep their skills active. Well I have decided to do the same thing, but with my programming skills. So from now on I am going to code one feature a day into an application.

Here is my little app (Below). She is a System Up Timer that will keep track of how long she has been running for. She is an ugly little thing at the mo, but if I keep coding her she will eventually grow into something useful.

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This-morning I fixed a bug where she was loosing one second for every minuet she clocked and tomorrow I hope to improve here system memory usage, and probably make her look a little nicer, poor thing.

Possible big future features include multiple custom countdown timers, running from the system tray as just an icon, alarm functions and possibly even a line chart one-day showing session times and stats like average system running time.

I am coding in Visual Basic 2005 Express (Beta1), which compiles into .Net framework 2.0 code. Nothing but the latest SDK, primarily because I like the intellisence coding in the 2005 edition. Which effectively allows me to insert code by selecting it from a list, instead of hunting through documentation to find an example of the code I am looking for.