Old Virtual Pen Project History

28 fev 2002

• Playing around with .net. This could very well be the replacement technology I was looking for. A front-end could easily be implemented using .net WinForms. Just ordered a few books on the subject (C#, .net, WinForms, etc.).
• Fixed a problem in the back-end, where dialogs were never deleted.
• The asynchronicity of the back-end with respect to the front-end can induce stange looping behaviours if the front-end interleaves variable changes with those of the back-end... Eeek.

27 feb 2002

• Working on visual selection feed-back.
• EPSITEC meeting.

26 feb 2002

• Implemented the missing parts of the rectangular zone object selection. This required the support of commands ViewRightPress and ViewRightRelease, which invoke the document view HandleRightPress and HandleRightRelease methods, which generate the StartObjectSelection, BeginRectInObjectSelection, UpdateRectInObjectSelection, EndRectInObjectSelection and ValidateObjectSelection commands.
• Updated todo list.
• Updated display in the WidgetGraphicBoard class.

25 feb 2002

• End of cleanup in the attribute edition code; this touched all the A-... source files, DocObjAttr.h, DocObjAttr.cpp, the command parser and the style edition manager.
• Implemented a new version of the AttrSetValue command.
• Removed all the Styled::Context related code; the context is really no longer used, since the path to the active styles is now maintained in the style edition manager, thanks to Styled::Record and Styled::PropPath collections.
• The command manager can now optimise away useless transactions (when zero or just one command is in a transaction block, the transaction block does not add anything).
• Added an Optimise method for the command execution classes : there is a new CMD_IMPLEMENT_OPTIMISE macro used to define it. Read more here.
• The document manager creates properly flagged styles in CreateNewFamilyStyle.

From the previous TODO list :

• The notifications can be buffered (delayed); method DelayNotify sets the document in a recording mode; no notification gets forwarded until DelayNotify gets turned off.
• Addressed the question about object/alias locking.
• Binding between style and family is now OK. Following the first alias referrer leads to the family block.
• Updated documentation (aliases, commands, family manager and styles).

23 feb 2002

• Non-VP work. Mainly maintainance.

21 feb 2002

• Whole day in Geneva; conference organised by Microsoft Switzerland with Don Box about .net and the CLR. Impressive...

20 feb 2002

• Cleaning up attribute edition code. While doing this, I decided to launch into another refactoring session... ended 25 feb 2002.
• Started refactoring of the property access, delegating as much as possible to the style edition manager (Styled::Manager); most of the logic currently in the user interface controllers (e.g. UIStyledLineSimple) can be replaced by generic algorithms, based on the attribute editor interface (VP::DocAttr::EditorOp).
• Work in progress : Styled::Manager::ReadValue/WriteValue supersede the AccessReadOnly/ReadWrite methods. The old methods are still there but will have to be removed soon. A-LineStyle.cpp must be cleaned up too...
• VP::DocAttr::SetValue/GetValue need some polishing.
• DocManager::SetFamilyStyle uses a ReplaceStyle semantic when updating the style edition manager, which allows for much less notifications/updates than before, when a style is replaced by its exact clone.

19 feb 2002

• Working on the style modification and cloning mechanisms.
• Fixed a few problems which caused lots of redundant updates bound to the style change notifications. By the way, extended the GUISyn::Variables class to maintain a cache of the VP::Unit::Val associated to every variable.
• Cleaned up the styled.cpp and objclone.cpp source files.

18 feb 2002

• Fixed bug in document initialisation (introduced while refactoring last week), which caused VP to crash when loading documents.
• When creating figures, the style used for each figure is shared/cloned automatically, as needed. This required a change in class DocManager, to notify class Styled::Manager when the operating mode of the document manager changes.

15 feb 2002

• Finished refactoring of styles and family management.
• Fixed a nasty bug which caused the previous implementation to crash (and which was the cause for all this change).
• Removed command CloneFamilyStyle. Replaced it with a pair of CloneStyle and SetFamilyStyle commands.
• Added transactions to the Cmd::Manager class which allow for both glueing together commands and rolling back commands if a sequence gets aborted.
• Next things to do will be to :
  • Clean up the styled.cpp and objclone.cpp source files.ü
  • Clean up the attribute edition code.ü
  • Enable the use of the attribute editor to simplify the implementation of the GUI.ü

14 feb 2002

• Refactoring the styles and family management. Following modifications have been completed today :
  • Removed both style roots (full style list and auto style list) from class Document.
  • Moved the families one level up the hierarchy. Families are now at the top level of the document, as root blocks. 
  • Updated the DocObj::Family::Manager and the DocObj::Style::Manager.
  • The FamilyManager class in the back-end was updated.
• The project is now broken and requires more updating, specifically class DocManager and command CloneStyle require some additional work.
• The documentation is not up-to-date anymore.

13 feb 2002

• Still more design. I feel much more confortable today, since I think I have found a way to simplify all the styles/families/cloning/undo/redo stuff, which gave me so much headaches recently.
• Compiled the whole project with Visual Studio .net (aka VC++ 7) and it caused some trouble compiling (a few C++ conformance problems). The code produced by VC++ 7 does not work properly. I will not investigate this today.

12 feb 2002

• More design... I am still not finished with the styles problems. 

11 feb 2002

• Working on style edition.
• Added command CloneFamilyStyle while reworking the style edition tools.

08 feb 2002

• Upgraded OPaC OPTextLine into OPSmartTextLine in order to support a command line history.
• Added support for keyboard shortcuts; pressing the Return key in the debugger command window now sends the command to the back-end.

07 feb 2002

• Documented the commands added the day before (CloneStyle, ReplaceAlias) and updated a set of related documents.
• Fixed bugs in the DeleteObject and ObjectCreation commands.

06 feb 2002

• Oops... I almost missed a very important point : every modification done while editing styles should be undoable. This adds a lot of constraints on the way cloning/replacing of styles is implemented.
• Fixed several problems with the undo/redo mechanism, broken a few months ago. Now, it is again possible to undo and redo a drawing and have it work as expected.
• Added following commands to the back-end : CloneStyle and ReplaceAlias needed by the style edition dialog, Undo, Redo, PurgeUndo and PurgeRedo for testing purposes.
  CloneStyle and ReplaceAlias seem to be working as expected.
• Added support in the document manager for zombie objects (deleted objects which no longer exist, but which index cannot be reused, unless it gets explicitely resurrected). 

05 feb 2002

• Tackling the style replacement and cloning mechanism. This is much more complex and far-reaching as I expected first. I had forgotten to take into account the fact that the attribute edition dialog would have to be able to cope with several selected objects, with different subsets of style families.

04 feb 2002

• Found and fixed a bug which hung the back-end; a synchronisation with WDGS could fail if the data returned by WDGS crossed the end of the circular communication buffer and was split into halves.  

01 feb 2002

• Working on the user interface.

31 jan 2002

• Working on the user interface.
• The StyledManager class (Style Edition Manager) still does not provide everything needed for automatic cloning of styles on modification, but we are almost there.
• More Smaky troubles; this time, a solution was found, so everything should be fine from now on.

30 jan 2002

• Working on the user interface.
• In the todo list, there is no longer anything in the Fix ASAP section.
• Smaky troubles took some time (investigation without any positive result) and distracted me from my current style UI (re)design.

29 jan 2002

• Microsoft DevDays in Geneva on .NET.

28 jan 2002

• Intel C++ compiler version 5 finally produced executables... which did not work as expected in Release mode, because Ref::Resolve was fixed the wrong way.
  After a lots of hours of tedious bug seeking and template-twisting, VP now compiles properly on both Visual C++ version 5/6 and Intel C++ version 5.
• Redesigning details in the attribute edition procedure. Things are still not as clear to me as they should be.

26-27 jan 2002

• Tried compiling the whole project (VP, OPaC, GUISyn) with Visual C++ version 6, using the Intel C++ compiler version 5. Some work is still needed to get everything compile and link properly, since Intel's C++ compiler is much more standard conformant and picked up a lot of errors missed by Microsoft Visual Studio 5 compiler.

25 jan 2002

• Youpie ! When editing a value in the user interface, the attribute sample pane gets updated properly and the style gets updated. This is a milestone.
• Trying to compile the whole project with Visual Studio 6 and the Intel Compiler, version 5.0; a few changes were needed for OPaC to compile.

24 jan 2002

• Added support for GUISyn macros.
• I am ill... once again; not much valuable work.

23 jan 2002

• Working on OPaC for a better integration with the front-end.
• The macro widgets are now implemented by external code, located in the back-end, not in the GUISyn library.
  GUISYN_MACRO_INSERTER (name) defines a widget macro; the code has access to the current widget context (context) and the root widget (root).

22 jan 2002

• Class WidgetDropLine supports keyboard navigation of the drop-down list; this required improvement of the OPaC menu.
• Work needed on the Smaky - off topic, but took some time.

21 jan 2002

• Adding a drop-down list which was missing from the OPaC library. It is currently located in the front-end and implemented by class WidgetDropLine.
• Improved look & feel of OPaC OPTextLine; modified also OPMenu, OPMenuArchitect and OPWindow.
• Added more symbolic colors to OPaC (for the text line and the window bar, mainly).
• Added preliminary support for macro widgets; creating a GUISyn widget with the macro=name tag calls GUISyn::Widget::InsertMacro (name), which can then populate the widget as needed. 

18 jan 2002

• More design, first draft implementation of the line style edition.

17 jan 2002

• Added documentation about the styles and the automatic styles.
• Fixed a small problem in ObjectStore::DuplicateObject, which simply copied links bitwise. Copying a link requires some maintainance on the referrer side.
• Added function to clone a style and all its sub-styles; this will be used by the full sample user interface, when an existing style is modified.
• Design phase : how to manage style edition (detailed design needed).

16 jan 2002

• Continuing work on the style edition UI classes.
• Introduced a new way to delay redraws in the user interface, which removes all the flicker when the GUI is being modified and updated in several steps.
  From the back-end, simply call BackdoorProcessor::PostBatchRedraw to enable or disable the batch redrawing (enable = redraw postponed, disable = immediate redraw).
• Cleaned up and simplified command management. Exec, DialogNotify and the {} substitution mechanisms have been reworked. Moreover, there is now a simple way to declare parsable enums.
• Added support to read pixels back from the icon to get their RGB components; this is very useful for the color picker bar.

15 jan 2002

• Updated GUISyn::Variables. This had ramifications into the TempMem::Pool and Allocator management, Association and Pair classes, etc.
• VP does no longer leak memory when communicating between front-end and back-end.
• Started implementation of the style edition UI classes (UIStyledPaint and UIStyledLine for now, based on a new common UIControlChild). 

14 jan 2002

• Modified OPaC OPBoxView class so that we can use it as a separator in a dialog.
• Added support to dynamically add and remove parts of dialogs through GUISyn.
• Updated the OPaC garbage collector (it was never updated after the big changes undertaken last century, which changed the way the references are handled). Re-enabled it.
• Memory is being eaten up at excessive rates by the front-end : GUISyn::Variables class uses a pool to clone local variables and strings, which is only freed when the variables are deleted... but they are long lived !
• Implemented dialog event notification through the DialogNotify command, which calls DialogHelperOp::NotifyEvent.

11 jan 2002

• Added more debugging commands (see full command list).
• Implemented basic commands for the full sample user interface. Clicking on the color wells changes the selected style (still work to be done here).
• Started implementation of a new icon grid widget, which can be used to pick colors from a grid of cells or pick colors from an image.

10 jan 2002

• Fixed DocView::HandleLeftPress.
• Fixed Cmd::Manager::Execute.
• When loading a document, the view now gets fully synchronised.
• Removed experimental stuff (ui-experimental.cpp) and turned it into something more solid (ui-main.cpp).
• Added documentation about commands and the special !action variable.
• Improved the FullSample controller class; this implied extending GUISyn to add more specialised icons (namely icon.led.radio and icon.led.switch).
• Fixed initialisation of GUISyn widgets; they were not set to their original state when they were created, but only when the variables were modified later on.

09 jan 2002

• Fixed BackdoorPacketSpy, so that the last command gets stored to the backdoor-packet.history file before the application crashes.
• Fixed loading : former family managers get ResetAndDeleted and then reinstanciated based on the new document. Flushed family style cache.
• The line sample painted by the Sampler class now extracts the real line style information from the selected style.
• The widgets which rely on user icons get updated when their icon definition gets changed by the back-end. This implied adding a dictionary mapping from user icon names to views.

08 jan 2002

There has been a quiet period for some time. This was the result of my web-edition platform (laptop) being repaired by DELL. Furthermore, I was off duty from december 22 up to january 6. Now, I have returned to VP's internals... Things have not changed much since mid-december.

• Added experimental line style family, which unconvered several small design errors.
• Debugging in order to get things straight, and remember what was done where, how and why.
• Fixed small bug with polygonal figures; when clicking on the last grip, this added one more point before terminating the creation. The press/release events had to be suppressed when a grip was clicked.
• Added a section 'Fix ASAP' to the things to do list.

History of previous months.