Month: December 2010

  • Windows 7-style Notification Area Applications in WPF: Part 6 (Notify Icon Position: Pre-Windows 7)

    View source on GitHub. In Part 2 of this series I demonstrated how to use the Shell_NotifyIconGetRect function to find the position of a notify icon. This function is new to Windows 7, however, and we must find a different solution for earlier versions of Windows. This turns out to be quite difficult. A post…

  • Windows 7-style Notification Area Applications in WPF: Part 5 (Fixing Aero Borders)

    View source on GitHub. An issue that came to my attention only recently is that the borders of WPF (update: WPF is not actually to blame) windows without captions/title-bars (that is, with ResizeMode set to ‘CanResize’ and WindowStyle set to ‘None’) are drawn incorrectly when the DWM (read: Aero Glass) is enabled. Specifically, the upper…

  • Study Score Archive 2010: School Names Added

    The Herald Sun has very kindly updated its website to include school names. I’m very grateful to them for taking the time to do this, given that they are no doubt busy with other projects. Thanks also to everyone who contacted them requesting this data – it is very unlikely that we would have seen…

  • Study Score Archive Updated for 2010

    Tonight I released the Study Score Archive for 2010. Download it here. Unfortunately, as I noted in the previous post, the Herald Sun did not publish school names along side student names online this year. For this reason, the 2010 release is much narrower in scope than those of previous years. Update: school data now…

  • 2010 Study Score Archive: Update Status

    Early this morning the Herald Sun published its annual Top Scorers section online. Unlike in previous years where the website simply served a set of static pages corresponding to VCE subjects, this year’s website features an interactive search tool exclusively. It is possible to search by surname and by study name. In general, the new…

  • Scaled Study Score Interpolation in the Study Score Archive

    As I previously mentioned, this year’s release of the Study Score Archive will feature estimated scaled scores alongside raw scores. Helpfully, VTAC provides scaling data in the annual Scaling Report, but correspondences between raw scores and scaled scores for each subject are provided only for scores that are greater than 20 and are multiples of…

  • Windows 7-style Notification Area Applications in WPF: Part 4 (Multiple Monitors)

    View source on GitHub. At the end of Part 3 in this series, I noted that the window positioning logic depends on accurately getting the bounds of the monitor where the notify icon is located. Specifically, we require the bounds of the working area (the space on the monitor excluding the taskbar and other docked…

  • Windows 7-style Notification Area Applications in WPF: Part 3 (Taskbar Position)

    View source on GitHub. In the previous post in this series, I showed how to find the location of a notify icon by implementing the new Windows 7 Shell32.dll function Shell_NotifyIconGetRect in managed code for use with the System.Windows.Forms.NotifyIcon class. In this post, I will look at how to accurately position a window above (or…

  • Windows 7-style Notification Area Applications in WPF: Part 2 (Notify Icon Position)

    View source on GitHub. You may have noticed that the notification area applications in Windows 7 (Volume/Power/Network/Action Centre) appear centred above their icon. I wanted Keiki to do the same; the current version is hardcoded to sit in the bottom right of the screen, which causes a few problems: The taskbar position is not taken…

  • VCE Study Score Archive: Improvements for 2010

    The number of years since I finished VCE continues to increase, but I still plan to publish my Study Score Archive once results are released in the near future. There will be one major additional feature this year: scaling of scores. Newspapers only publish raw scores, which can be misleading: a raw score of 40…