Mere Naina Saawan bhaado…

I saw the film “Naina” yesterday. I haven’t seen such a bad movie in recent times. I dont know what is the director’s idea of a horror movie. He thinks showing a cesarean childbirth scares people. What it really did was make people throw up. Showing partially burned people and a human body in the middle of a medical operation etc are the “scariest” scenes in the film. I am surprised how the film got past the censor board.
Yuck !

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1 year at Tavant

Today I completed 1 year at Tavant.
Congrats to me 😉

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Let there be autocompletion…

Auto completion for command prompt is a good feature to have. I found about it today, although I have seen it on Binil’s machine quite some time ago. He told me it was done using editing the Windows registry and he didnt remember the exact steps. Windows registry not being the thing to play with, I left it at that. Today I was looking at the Global Assembly Cache using command prompt (Explorer doesnt give you the real view), I felt it would be nice to have this feature. I googled to find the answer nicely written down in simple steps. For the benefit of the fortunate few who reads my blog, I list the steps here 😉

• Log on as Administrator
• Click Start, and then click Run
• Type Regedit and OK
• Double click HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
• Double click SOFTWARE
• Double click Microsoft
• Double click Command Processor
• In the right pane of Regedit, double click the ‘CompletionChar’ DWORD value
• Type 9
• Click OK
• Close Regedit

There you are, all set to go…

Trick courtesy ActiveWin

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Strange Beautiful Music

Yesterday evening I went for the Joe Satriani concert with Tony, Rony and Jenson. Rony managed to get us some VIP passes so that we could see Joe from the very front. We reached the Palace Grounds by 5:45 pm and people were already standing in the queue for entering. We stood in the queue for half an hour before we found it was the wrong one 🙂

VIP entrance was a different one and there was no queue there. Once we entered the stadium, we were really surprised to see that there were only few people. Tony was disappointed because Satriani is going to be disappointed when he sees the crowd 😀

A local band called Brahma played some songs before the actual concert started. They were not really bad, but recieved a lot of booes :-)) I felt that they were trying to be like Metallica a little too much, they could do much better if they try to have some identity of their own. As time passed by the crowd became strong and Tony was happy.

Satriani pulled a great show on the stage. He has this knack of making people go really wild and to get them very much involved into the show. I am making no comments of his amazing and unbelievable talent, the ads say it all – Joe Satriani, The God of Guitar. For the uninitiated it would be good to know that Joe Satriani has had 11 Grammy Nominations, 11 solo albums and millions of record sold world wide and has taught guitar to Kirk Hammet (Metallica) and Steve Vai.

All in all, the show the excellent and a memorable event for all of us. I am sure the guitar sales is going to be higher this week in Bangalore 🙂

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Still “On Top”

Sony just found from MSDN that just adding a coma and one word could achieve what I wanted 🙂

frmShowOnTop.Show ,frmMain

By the way, the method I posted yesterday was showing some strange behaviour. When I call SetParent API, the Coolbar (or Rebar) just disappeared underneath the menus. Couldnt find out what the problem was.

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On Top of The World…

I was facing an issue for quite some time with Visual Basic 6. I needed to make an MDI child window “On Top” of other MDI child windows. The obvious solution was to use the win32 API function SetWindowPos. I made a small function which will make a window “On Top” and back to “normal”.

Public Sub MakeAlwaysOnTop(frm As Form, SetOnTop As Boolean)
Dim lflag as long
If SetOnTop Then
lflag = HWND_TOPMOST
Else
lflag = HWND_NOTOPMOST
End If
SetWindowPos frm.hwnd, lflag, 0,0, 0, 0, _
SWP_NOMOVE Or SWP_NOSIZE
End Sub

This works fine for normal windows but NOT for MDI child windows. If I minimize the MDI parent form, the “On Top” form will not get minimized but it will still stay “On Top” of any other application that might be running. Not a good solution. If I make the MDI Child property of the form to False, then it doesnt work at all (it simply doesnt stay on top).
I was surprised to find that almost all of the Google search results pointed to using the above method only. I am sure that many people would have faced the same problem. Then I remembered reading something on the web regarding setting the parent of a form at runtime.

So I tried this code in the Form_Load of my form after setting its MDI Child property to False.

Private Sub Form_Load()
SetParent Me.hwnd, fMainForm.hwnd
MakeAlwaysOnTop Me, True
End Sub

That did the trick 🙂
Now the window stayed on top of other MDI child windows and automatically minimized when I minimized the MDI parent.
Big thanks to the person from whom i got the clue for using SetParent API function.

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