Advanced literals for Visual Studio

As soon as I learned that Microsoft had opened a channel at uservoice.com so that we (developers) could suggest new/improved features for the upcoming Visual Studio 11 (now known as Visual Studio 2012), the first thing I wanted to suggest was the ability to easily handle numbers of different bases, natively.

Regardless of the language, which in this case is VB, consider the beauty and simplicity of the following code:

Dim decNum = 726d
Dim binNum = 1001b
Dim hexNum = f7a1h
Dim octNum = 167o

Here we are initializing several numeric variables which obtain their value based on a compiler automated procedure that converts the number into an unsigned integer from a base predefined by a suffix letter that conditions the conversion to the appropriate base type.

Then we would require simple ToXXX() functions (as well as “CType “, “DirectCast” or “as”, in C#, support) in order to easily and specifically convert from one type to another without requiring a string intermediate, as we do now… which, frankly, sucks!

For this to work, the Framework should implement distinct types for each base (of course, only for the most common ones) and derive them all from UInt (and make UInt inheritable) so that it’s easy to perform simple type castings between them and allows us to extend it to support any custom base.

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OnlineVideos SiteManager

I’m an avid user of MediaPortal. Actually, since about 4 months ago, it has been my only mean of watching TV… just last week I cancelled my cable subscription and, right now, the only thing that is shown on my TV comes from MediaPortal.

I have to admit that it is not (yet) perfect but it is, by far, the best media center I’ve tried (and I think I have tried them all).
One of the things I like the most is that MediaPortal has been designed around a robust plugin API which allows developers to create AddOns that either enhance MediaPortal or provide additional features.

One of my most beloved plugins is OnlineVideos. But as much as I love this plugin I feel there are some areas that could be greatly enhanced. Such is the section in the plugin where you select which “stations” or “sites” to include.
I’m sure that many users are happy by having all the sites included but me, being a control freak, I like to fine tune which sites I want available for streaming.

So, to mainly satisfy my (apparently unique) needs I’ve started working on a small utility that can, considerably, ease the process of selecting which sites to include in the plugin.

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Subtitles Editor (Beta 1)

Here’s the first beta version of Subtitles Offset which includes many improvements and changes.
This version is considered to be feature complete so all future version (until 1.0 is released) will only include bug fixes, performance and UI improvements.

• Changed the name of the program from Subtitles Offset to Subtitles Editor
• The Captions Browser has been considerably improved as it now displays the audio wave form detected in the video
• Added icons and controls to facilitate zooming into the Captions Browser
• The Captions Editor has now been integrated into the main window
• Added support to easily specify HTML tags to define the color and font of the captions
• Fixed a very annoying bug that caused the Captions Browser to incorrectly calculate the correct time of the video
• Added full spell-checking capabilities with support for multiple languages. Note that downloading new dictionaries is a bit buggy and you may need to refresh the dictionaries list several times before it’s properly populated
• The program now includes an Installer
• Many, many small bug fixes…

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Screensaver Settings version 0.4

This is a major upgrade from the previous release which fixes a ton of bugs, improves compatibility with the latest gnome-screensaver and gnome-screensaver-preferences and it also provides an x64 version. […]

Subtitles Offset (Alpha 4)

For the past few months I have been extremely busy working on a new (and very exciting) project so I haven’t had much time to get bored… besides, I’ve switched from Cable/Satellite to a Media Center using MediaPortal so I’ve been pretty entertained.

But because now I get to watch a lot of content downloaded from the Internet I’m using Subtitles Offset more than ever so I’ve been meaning to update it with some features that really needed to be implemented. Also, I wanted to fix several annoying bugs that made it too unstable to be fully usable.

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