The home of MH#progs and C# programming  

Who is Electriac?

 

Electriac is my screen name on numerous sites devoted to C# programming.

 

http://www.codeproject.com/

http://www.programmersheaven.com/c/authorpage.asp?AuthorID=134654

http://www.csharphelp.com/archives4/archive680.html

http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/mgold/GeorgeSteevesTutorials12082007234921PM/GeorgeSteevesTutorials.aspx?MessageChildID=3838&Delete=true

 

I am:

George Steeves

email: electricfarm@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

New 2008.08.15 - New Media Player with axmediaplayer and Express 2005

 

WMPlayer.exe 

 

New 2008.07.27 - Writing a multi line text box with word wrap to a text file

textBox saved to text file

 

New 2008.07.28 - A Marching Ants Selector:

 

MarchingAntsSelector.zip

 

 New 2008.03.16 - Process pictures for internet:

 

Recently I have been helping some newbies with digital images.  They wanted to know how to resize and reformat images for the internet.  Rather than showing each one of these people how, I wrote this little program to simplify the process.  This program automaticaly writes to .jpg in several standard sizes and aspects.

 

MHpicprep.exe

 

I have had a lifelong interest in photography and I am now putting together a web site to display my pictures.

 

electricphotoalbum.googlepages.com

 

 

New 2008.03.16 - My current Hardware

 

I am often asked what hardware I am using and what method I use to archive data.  Well here is my current system.

 

My Hardware 2008.03.17

 

 

New 2008.02.21 - About the Asus eeepc

 

I am in the process of creating a WIFi access to play my media collection. The device I plan on using is a Asus eee mini laptop ($349). For the whole story see:

 

Asus eeepc WiFi access point

 

 

 

 

New 2008.03.03 - Newest Program - Garden Planting Guide

 

Garden Planting Guide In C#

 

 

Through the years I have learned many programming languages. I have a preference for bare bones simple code when I am first learning a language rather than a piece of code that illustrates 20 ideas. MSDN is a good example of the confusing tutorial as their code is always bloated with irrelevant alternatives. These programs I wrote for a group of aspiring programmers 12-15 years old. Each program "cuts to the chase" and accomplishes a specific task using an absolute minimum of code. The kids are amazed when they can write six lines of code and play their MP3 files. I have also noted the addition of System.<includes> as I always had to ferret out which ones were used for what.

 

2008.07.28 - I have recently updated my C# Tutorials and it is available here.  It has now been downloaded over 4000 time

Tutor01 - Hello World

Tutor02 - Simple Directory
Tutor03 - Display A Picture
Tutor04 - Word Search
Tutor05 - Write Read
Tutor06 - Recursive Directory Search
Tutor07 - Spawn a child process
Tutor08 - Detect Screen res and display full screen
Tutor09 - Random Number
Tutor10 - Clipboard image to file
Tutor11 - Show drive info
Tutor12 - yesno query
Tutor13 - Simple MP3 Player WMP
Tutor14 - ShowVideo
Tutor15 - For loop to examine a string
Tutor16 - printPage
Tutor17 - Print Rectangle
Tutor18 - Sort an Array
Tutor19 - Pass info between forms
Tutor20 - Draw a pie and fill the segments
Tutor21 - Draw CD cover graphic
Tutor22 - Proofsheet of Images
Tutor23 - Print Picture

Tutor24 - Mousepanel
Tutor25 - Text to Speech
Tutor26 - Elapsed Time
Tutor27 - ScreenCapture
Tutor28 - slideshow
Tutor29 - advtimer
Tutor30 - mp3alarmclock
Tutor31 - textBoxToFile

Download Tutorials.zip ( 3170 K )

 

Downloaded 4544 times

 

 

Update 2008.02.24 -  TV advertising

 

I have recently been really annoyed with the excess of advertising on many TV programs. I believe there is an FCC limit on the percentage of time consumed by advertising in a TV program and I plan on registering some complaints. It occurred to me that rather than just making an accusation it would be wise to document my complaint with timing of programming vs advertising so I wrote this little program. It is one of the first programs I wrote using the timer for multiple events and calculating elapsed time so there are probably better ways to go about the task but this does what I needed.

 

Download advtimer.zip (10k)

 

 

 

 

Update 2008.02.22 - Screen Capture

 

I often use screen captures and I have written several screen capture programs over the years. Recently I decided to try writing a new capture device under framework 3.0 and Vis2008. The first time I used this device to capture my desktop and view the result with Mhview I thought that the device was not working properly I started clicking on my desktop icons and nothing happened and then I noticed the Mhview “Exit” button in the upper left of the screen and realized I was viewing an image of my desktop rather than my desktop. In the past my capture programs always deteriorated the quality of the image noticeably but this new programs capture was of much higher quality. I have not yet identified the reason but rather than arguing with success I am posting this new version. I am not sure if framework 3.0 is necessary to run the program as I have it installed on my machine.

 

 

 Download ScreenCap.zip (8k)

 

 

 

 

This winter I have kept myself very busy and have written or rewritten a lot of software.  Most recently I have been working on image processing programs.  The program folder MH#progs has become too large and I have now created a new folder dedicated to image processing called MH#image.  All the programs were written under Vis .NET 2008 and the framework 3.5.

 

Image Processing Group MH#image

 

 

 

In the past year with the help of a talented programmer, Luc Pattyn of Belgium, we created MGimage now updated to MHimage.exe.  This program provides a vitual darkroom for image processing.  Resizing, cropping, color correction, format conversion, date imbedding, and much more are all possible with this program.  In the past few weeks I have also added printing capability. 

 

I do a lot of screen captures from the internet and I had been using my program MGclip2file.exe  which required selecting the window pressing Alt-PrintScreen and then saving the file.  MHclipper.exe simpifies the process by simply saving the desktop to a file.  There is also the ability to define the section of the screen to capture with the mouse. 

 

I have rewritten MHcompose.exe which I wrote many years ago and have used frequently.  It allows for compositing up to five images on a single parent.  The old version did not have a graphical interface so it required someone to be familiar with screen mathematics.  The new program retains the accuracy of doing the composition numerically but also provides a graphic interface.

 

In my landscape business I have frequent need for mechanical drawings.  CAD programs are overkill for my humble needs.  I had a program many years ago that created a simple graph paper and allowed me to place graphic primatives on the form but with the evolution of windows it was made obsolete.  This new program MHgrafit.exe creates a 1000 x 750 image which can be printed on a standard 8.5x11 sheet of paper without resizing which destroys the detail of an image.

 

I have recently started development of MHpaint.exe a paint program it is still a work in progess that probably will not be ready for beta release for some time.

2008.02.02 I have all the graphic primatives working and picking and pasting of brushes.

 

Often I want to print a picture but I want to have exact control of the output size. I wrote a function to do this for my programs. Most of my programs like Mhimage.exe have this printing ability built into the program but to make this available to people that have not purchased Mhimage.exe I have created this program Download MHprintpic.zip (9k) which is a free ware printing device for images.  The source code is included in tutorial 23 above.

 

In years past when I was using a 35mm camera we would always create a proof sheet of our negatives.  This was a handy device allowing a customer to paruse images and select those they were interested in.  I have often thought of this and decided I wanted to do the same for my  digital images.  To do this I created MHproofsheet.exe which prints all the images in a directory to a hard copy 35 images to page. 

 

I am sure most people have become familiar with the Ken Burns technique of panning and zooming on still photos.  This has been part of Adobe Premier - Hollywood FX for some time but I wanted a simple little program dedicated to this task.  MHpicpan.exe  is such a program.

 

I continually want a stand alone picture viewer. The MG#progs package had one but as I updated to MH# I had included the picture viewing capabilities into the various programs. Unfortunately this left Windows reverting to the “Windows fax viewer” which I hate. I like my pictures displayed full screen on a black background, without a window and resized to the size of the the screen. This is a simple project in C# but I just didn't get around to it for some time. I have now made MHview.exe my default viewer for .tif .bmp and .jpg so when a click on the icon of any of these types I get the display I desire. You can also drop the icon of an image on a shortcut to Mhview.exe and it will display the image. Of course because it accepts the image filename on the command line you can use it to construct presentations using a .bat or .exe executable.

 

                                                  

Multi-Media Processing Group MH#progs

                         

 This is the first beta release of MH#progs which replaces MG#progs.  You can
leave MG#progs on your machine and use both while making the transition.   

This folder replaces the previous MG#progs.  All these programs have been
recompiled under Visual .NET 2008 Express and utilize the .NET framework 3.5
which is the newest version of the framework.  Several months ago I removed all media files from MG#progs and redirected rips, recordings, and lists to the directory MH#files.  The new program folder is a self contained entity with no media that can be placed anywhere on your machine and requires no setup.  I suggest you place it on the root of any one of your drives.   I have used the MH#files directory to deposit newly created media files in.  Before these programs can be run you MUST update you framework with 3.0 and 3.5.

 

This new program replaces the previous version MG#.exe and is called MHwmp.exe. (Windows Media Player)  Since the player is completely internal to the program no setup is necessary as was previously necessary.  This program is a player and database for Multi-Media.  The biggest change is made possible by the fact that the axWindowsMediaPlayer and support files are included with the new Visual .NET Compiler.  This has allowed the playing of 14 different file types by this new program.  There is a noticable improvement in audio quality under the new framework.  File types presently supported.

 

MP3, WAV, BMP, TIF, JPG, TS.IFO, MPG, AVI, WMV, VOB, AVS, APE, FLAC and ASX 

 

I have been including media play functions within my various programs recently but this has still left me being sent to the Windows default Media Player each time I clicked on an icon. For this reason I have recently written a stand alone media player called MHplay.exe that I have all my file associations linked to so I don't get the Windows Media player when I click on a media icon.

 

Since we usually rip our CD's to 192kbs this is the ripper we use most of the time.  I have updated MHrip192.exe to the new framework, the latest version of Lame, and updated the .dll's.  I have also added the ability to rip to .flac files.  The ripper now creates an associated graphic for all file types (mp3, wav, and flac). In time I will get to the rewrite of the other bitrates for mp3..

 

 

MHrecord.exe is an analog audio recording program updated to the new framework.  I have added a feature which connects to internet to record streaming audio.  You can now program the recording times.

 

 

MHavs.exe is a graphic user interface for AVIsynth which is a frame server for video files.  This is a very efficient way to edit video files.  To use the program it is necessary to install AVIsinth which is located in the directory MH#progs\AVIsynth where there is a .BAT file to do the install. 

 

MHbigdir.exe is a program to copy, move, rename, and display files.

 

Programming For Natural History Identification

 

I have envisioned a general purpose program for doing identification.  A program where someone could author an identifier.  I have had several incarnations of this idea up and running but have been unable to create a market for it.  I still feel a Identification Data Authoring System is of significant value for Natural History identification.  

 

 

For information About the NE Fern Identifier a program that has been maintained and updated for over 15 years.  Current edition compatible with Win XP and Vista.

 

Another computer application for Natural History data is my newest version of my Garden Planting Guide In C#

 

 

This is the state of the work 2008.03.16