Author: Ahmet Yüksektepe

Flexible Displays and Surfaces

Ahmet Yüksektepe

We read everywhere about new tablets, new smartphones or new televisions. These gadgets get thinner and yet we still can’t transport our televisions in our pockets. One essential display technology still didn’t arrive: The Flexible Displays.

Flexible Displays are obviously the next level in the development of displays technologies. They will change our lives in many ways. To find out what flexible displays actually are and what concepts exist in this area (there are really some extraordinary ideas out there). You can take a look at our paper and the references. Its only available in german, at the moment:

You can download our Paper here: Flexible_Display_and_Surfaces.pdf

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Find File Snippet – Depth First And Breadth First Search

Ahmet Yüksektepe

Two usefull snippets, if you need to do a quick file search, here a recursive and a breadth first implementation (ignored the not-authorized-exception):
(took me only 2 mins, love .Net 🙂

Depth First Implementation:

static string[] FindFile_DepthFirst(string directoryName, string fileName)
{
   return Directory.GetFiles(directoryName, fileName, SearchOption.AllDirectories);
}

Breadth First Implementation:
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Update GUI Control From Non-GUI-Thread Without Marshalling

Ahmet Yüksektepe

In .Net when you want to update a GUI Control, for example a ListView, you have to execute your update code in the GUI Thread which controls your Form and its child GUI Objects. While you are in another Thread, you call the Invoke or BeginInvoke (for async.) method of your GUI Control for this purpose. You pass this method a delegate of your method, which contains your update code, and the GUI Thread invokes the method that is passed. Well the whole story is infact much more complicated and this article gives you a nice in-depth view on this topic:
WinForms UI Thread Invokes: An In-Depth Review of Invoke/BeginInvoke/InvokeRequred

 

This is how Microsoft wants us to manage our GUI stuff, Continue reading

How to get Main Window Handle of the last active window

Ahmet Yüksektepe

While developing a litte application for Windows 7 in C# i encountered the problem that i needed to focus the last window after i started my application. Althought my application was closing after execution immediately, focus was not recurring to the last window because i was starting my application from the windows taskbar. For fixing this side-effect, i needed to find out, which window was active before my programm was “born”. So i did some googling for finding out how to get the previously active window handle in windows 7. In almost every thread, it was recommended to “listen” to window activation changes, and save the previous handle in a variable or so. But in my case, i wanted to avoid, running the programm permanently, or run anything in the background..
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