I’ve been coding like crazy the last few days 🙂 on an astronomy-related application. I had to remember lots of trigonometry from 15 years ago 🙁

The application is supposed to be a tool for discovering white dwarfs in our galaxy utilising information from astronomical archives (e.g. SDSS, SuperCOSMOS) through the use of Web Services. It’s been interesting so far. I had to deal with asynchrony issues when interacting with services and when updating the GUI. It’s been fun.

Originally, I used ScPl for drawing the main part of the GUI which deals with a representation of our galaxy and the distribution of stars but due to the large number of plots, the user experience was compromised due to performance issues with the library. So, I decided to do some GDI+ programming myself for the main part of the GUI and only use ScPl (which is fantastic btw) for what it was meant for: the scientific graphs I will have to display later on.

I started drawing on my GUI but I was experiencing flickering during resizing. Then, I discovered these three calls that make a huge difference. Way cool.

SetStyle(ControlStyles.UserPaint, true);

SetStyle(ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint, true);

SetStyle(ControlStyles.DoubleBuffer, true);

Tools I am using… Having extreme fun with .NET 2.0 and VS.NET 2005 Beta 1 and a couple of astronomy and trigonometry books.

Today I am having sort of a break (girlfriend is back in the evening so have to clean flat etc :-).