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The Code Project Ticker

Rama Krishna Vavilala
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4.94/5 (10 votes)

Jun 27, 2002

CPOL

2 min read

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216880

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3607

A desk band ticker that scrolls the latest messages posted in the Lounge and other forums

Sample Image

Motivation

I always want to keep myself up to date with the latest happenings at The Code Project. The problem - I can't afford to launch IE every 5 minutes to see if there are any new and interesting threads or whether there are more messages posted to a particular thread. The idea came (originally from Colin Davies) that a desk band ticker which scrolled through all the latest messages would be pretty good in this regard. This will ensure that none of the action (like a Lounge flame war) is missed when it happens.

For a change (form me) this is totally written in unmanaged C++ using ATL/WTL 7. So .NET framework runtime is not required. Even the latest MFC/CRT dlls are not required. The code makes use of the latest attributed extensions in VC++.NET and also of the new classes in ATL7 to access webservices. Later on I will add support to host .NET based addins and also normal VBScript/JScript.

How To Install

  1. Unzip the CPTicker_demo.zip file. This will extract one file, CPTicker.dll.

  2. Register the CPTicker.dll by calling regsvr32 CPTicker.dll

  3. Right click on the task bar. This will show a menu as shown in the image below. From the Toolbars sub menu select "The Code Project Ticker". This will place The Code Project Ticker desk band on the task bar.

    Sample image 2

  4. The latest messages are shown and are periodically refreshed from the website.

  5. Clicking on any message will launch IE and navigate to the message thread view.

Update 6/30/2002

Thanks to Shog for his suggestions.

  1. There is a new settings dialog as shown in the top screen shot that allows users to configure colors as well as the animation speed. (Thanks to Tim Smith for his WTL color picker control). To bring up the dialog double click on the ticker band.
  2. Fixed some memory leaks

Pending Work

  1. Support for other sites like MSDN, SellsBrothers etc.
  2. Menu support for common tasks like posting to the lounge etc.

Please inform me of any problems and as usual suggestions are welcome.