Please Wait! Can’t You See My Cursor is Busy!

This years code camp was over all pretty good. One of the highlights for me was Rocky Lhotka’s presentation on “Practical Parallelism”. He did a very good job presenting the ins and outs of parallel programming. Of the entire presentation the coolest part for me was a small little code sample he showed that changes the mouse cursor to an hour glass while a given operation was in progress.

Yes I know far from ground breaking! But the way it was implemented was pretty darn neat. Take a look at the class below.

public sealed class BusyCursor : IDisposable
{
    #region Private Members

    private readonly FrameworkElement mFrameworkElement;

    #endregion

    #region Constructor

    ///
    /// Initializes a new instance of the  class.
    ///
    /// The framework element.
    /// The busy cursor.
    public BusyCursor(FrameworkElement frameworkElement, Cursor busyCursor)
    {
        mFrameworkElement = frameworkElement;
        mFrameworkElement.Cursor = busyCursor;
    }

    #endregion

    #region IDisposable Members

    ///
    /// Performs application-defined tasks associated with freeing, releasing, or resetting unmanaged resources.
    ///
    public void Dispose()
    {
        mFrameworkElement.Cursor = Cursors.Arrow;
    }

    #endregion
}

Ok great! Why is this so neat? I find the use of the IDisposable interface here pretty cool. This object will replace the cursor to a ‘Busy’ indicator when created, and switch it back for you when disposed! Lets look at how you could use this.

using (new BusyCursor(this as FrameworkElement, Cursors.Wait))
{
    Search();
}

Enjoy!,

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Screen Captures

I am not the kind of developer who knows all of the great little tools to do everything. I generally get by with the most commonly used tools and utilities that everyone knows and loves. However as I find myself doing more and more documentation, blogging and the like. I find many gaps in my current tool set. Just last night I was looking for a good easy to use screen capture utility that would cost me nothing. What I ended up finding is a very handy little tool called Cropper Capture. This a great tool and look forward to the new weapon in my arsenal of utilities.