Confessions of a Keytarist

Recently, I’ve been taking quite a few car photographs, and although I was pleased with the overall quality of the shots, they didn’t seem to “blast” of the page like those in the glossy mags.
After a bit of studying perhaps the most famous of them all, Top Gear, I decided to see if I could replicate the processing done on their images with mine.

I played around in Photoshop for quite a bit before settling on the process I describe below. I’m pretty pleased with the outcome, so I thought it worthy of inclusion on this blog. Hopefully some of you will find it useful too!

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Firstly, I couldn’t come up with a “snappy” title for this post, so went with the above. I guess I’m too busy to be even marginally creative!

I have recently been working with a multiple web project solution in Visual Studio. For ages, I’ve been switching between each web project by stopping debugging, setting the other as the start up project, and then starting debugging again. As you can imagine, this makes testing interoperability between the two quite a drag.

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Following on nicely from the last post, I have another quick trick I often use to give some of my more “meh” photos a bit more “yeh”.

We’ll start with the same photo as before:

As before, the image appears quite “flat” and lifeless. We can try and fix this with a very quick and (usually) efficient contrast tweak using a “soft light” layer.

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Time for another Photoshop trick; this time it’s a very quick and easy one that can add that little bit extra to a photo.

So, first of all we need an image to work with. Here’s one of my little cousin:

As you can see, the image appears very “flat”.  I know it’s not exactly a fantastic photo to begin with, especially as it’s from a 1mp camera phone, but it’s good enough to demonstrate this trick! Continue reading

A colleague came to me today asking if I knew of any way to remove the close button from a windows form, but still show the minimize and maximize buttons.

On the face of it, it sounded like an easy answer. I knew you could disable both the minimize and maximize buttons very easily from within the Visual Studio GUI – so surely there’s an option for the third button; the close button?
Actually, no. Whilst you can remove all three buttons in one go (changing the setting “ControlBox” to false.) and as previously mentioned, you can disable the maximize and minimize buttons (“MaximizeBox” and “MinimizeBox” settings respectively), there is no setting to directly control the Close button.

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I had to make a slight change to one of my applications for a customer today, making it check if it is already running on the local machine and, if it is, abandon it’s attempt to start up another instance.

My initial thoughts were to examine the executing processes and check for the existence of the application in the list:

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    string procName = Process.GetCurrentProcess().ProcessName;           
    Process[] processes= Process.GetProcessesByName(procName);
 
    if (processes.Length == 1)
    {
        //run application
        ...
    }

Now, whilst this works, it is easily “beatable” by simply changing the executable’s name. Doing so will cause the method “GetProcessessByName()” to return only a single match, instead of the current application and any other duplicate instances.

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