Category Archives: .net

An Explanation of Output Buffers in DirectSound

A DirectSound Buffer is a one-dimensional array of bytes which represent sound waves in a digital form. The data is laid out in a specified Microsoft.DirectX.DirectSound.WaveFormat which specifies the format type, number of channels, number of samples per second and so on.1
Each byte is a part of a sample, and a sample represents the average [...]

TextRenderer is slow, DrawString is wrong

After struggling with WinAPI code and hacks in .NET 1.0 I was really looking forward to the TextRenderer class when I first heard about it. But as it turns out, not only is TextRenderer horrible at measuring character size it is also monumentally slow at rendering text.

Dragging and dropping onto a RichTextBox

One of many flaws with the RichTextBox control is its lack of support for drag/drop operations. Luckily it’s simple to add. In fact, it’s so simple you’ll wonder why they didn’t just support it out of the box.

Making sure a number is between 0 and 255

Recently while reworking the code for the Ascgen dotNET I needed to make sure that a variable is between 0 and 255 before converting it to a byte, and I needed it to be as fast as possible since it can get called several million times a second.