Sometimes your first thought is your best one. Well this was definitely the case last week as I continued to struggle with getting the Syntax Highlighter working in an elegant fashion with the main GUI thread. In the end – threading was the solution. I perform some quick and dirty highlighting in the main thread which immediately updates the screen and then I also kick off a background job to highlight the rest of the file which is off screen. This works well and works seamlessly allowing on screen edits to pop up immediately and also meaning that paging up and down through the file gives a consistent look to the highlighting with no additonal calculation required. This backgrounding mechanism for syntax highlighting will also lend well to API lookups when we get to that.
I’m overdue for some new videos and of course as soon as I start thinking about putting together a demo I find all sorts of interesting issues and problems. So we’ll see what happens this week. We’re edging through summer and I’m no nearer to either getting the Rosegarden for Windows build finalised or adding the Kinect support back in to Friendlier – I’ve not even had time to play with the last Kinect for Windows SDK released in June. Time flies and I want both of those things sorted before September and before I have to start thinking about Windows 8 and tablet support.
Other Strings 