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Well, at least the last known bug. I have been refactoring the baseclasses of my UI so that less code needs to be written and adapted both the demo for the article and my game client. Of course some bugs emerged and some of them were not easy to find.
Here is a screenshot from the game client[^]. Transparency did not work correctly in the game client while the demo had no problems at all. It turned out that drawing onto the 3D scene in the background required to clear the background buffer. Why? No idea. The 3D scene fills the entire background, so clearing should not be required, but transparent UI elements will fill with artifacts if the buffer is not cleared each frame.
And the remaining bug? That's another strange one. Text is used everywhere and rendered correctly - except in the caption bar of the form. It's actually the same code that does the drawing, so it's another mystery why only a few letters appear and the rest remains invisible. And again the demo program has no such problems.
Eventually I'm going to find the reason for this one too, so I leave it to interested readers to come up with unit tests that work for this kind of bugs. 
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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THE LAST BUG
(unknown)
"But you're out of your mind,"
They said with a shrug.
"The customer's happy;
What's one little bug?"
But he was determined.
The others went home.
He spread out the program,
Deserted, alone.
The cleaning men came,
The whole room was cluttered
With memory-dumps, punch cards.
"I'm close," he muttered.
The mumbling got louder,
Simple deduction,
"I've got it, it's right,
Just change one instruction."
It still wasn't perfect,
As year followed year,
And strangers would comment,
"Is that guy still here?"
He died at the console,
Of hunger and thirst.
Next day he was buried,
Face down, nine-edge first.
And the last bug in sight,
An ant passing by,
Saluted his tombstone,
And whispered, "Nice try."
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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CDP1802 wrote: transparent UI elements will fill with artifacts if the buffer is not cleared each frame
Does the "clearing" by chance does not affect the alpha channel ?
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The 3D scene is rendered in the background before the UI is rendered. The pixels (RGBA) in the buffer should be overwritten. The depth buffer may have something to do with it, but the 3D stuff and controls were rendered normally. Only transparent controls had this problem. The last candidate may be the stencil buffer, which I don't really use, but I do clip child controls to the bounds of the parent control. That could indirectly set a mask in the stencil buffer.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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CDP1802 wrote: That could indirectly set a mask in the stencil buffer.
If this was it, then a simple 0 SetMask would have solved it... is probably more tricky ! 
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If I told you, I'd have to send a hit squad to kill you.
Please insist that I tell you.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I insist.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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I've been refused clearance to "sanitise" 12,813,308 CP members who might read the Lounge posting, so you're out of luck.
Or rather: you're bloody lucky, and I'm out of luck.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Shame. 
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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At 70 one marathon is incredible, but this is amazing.
Someone's therapist knows all about you!
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I could totally do it! I just need at least 7 stunt-doubles to do the hard part. 
On the other hand, you have different fingers. - Steven Wright
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I Eat Sleep Code.
Bryian Tan
modified 22-Mar-17 23:34pm.
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That is impressive indeed!
I was also impressed by Ranulph Fiennes[^] - at 61 he also ran seven in seven days, but that was four months after a heart attack and double bypass operation. He is a loon ... 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Wow!
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Singapore is a very small continent. (But incontinent is very possible there.)
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I come from a land where the wheel was being reinvented on a daily basis, so to speak. A time when REAL programmers built their applications from scratch, and libraries (other than stdio) were for sissies! Just tell me which bits to flip to get which result and then get out of my way. Trust me I'm going somewhere with this.
Fast forward 30+ years and the hardest thing for me is to let go of that "Do it yourself" thing. So, I often find myself spinning my wheels to try and figure out how things are done.
So (because of my 30+ year "handicap"), here's what a typical scenario looks like. Suppose I wanted to write a client/server app for Windows. I would...
1. First I would think "Oh, no problem! I've been doing this type of things for years!".
2. I would proceed to start writing an HTTP daemon for the server side component using the winsock library, because "I don't need no stinking full-blown web server for this app".
3. I would write a rudimentary client app using sockets to establish the foundation of the communications piece.
4. Inevitably, I'll get stuck on some trivial thing, google for a solution, then find someone who has done all of the work that I've done so far, in VS, in like 10 clicks of the mouse.
It still happens to me sometimes but not quite so much anymore, as I have submitted my will (so to speak) to VS and let it do all of the dirty work for me while I glue everything together.
Microsoft and many who support them, has figured out not just the fact that everything that will be done has pretty much been done already, but has also figured out how to automate the creation of pretty much everything.
I used to gripe about these 20-somethings who crank out apps in VS, and have no idea what's going on under the covers. But I am quickly realizing that this really is the way to go. Fortunately for me, I have built almost every type of app from scratch, so I have a very good understanding of what's under the covers. It just took me this long to realize that this is not an excuse to continue building everything from scratch.
Anyway, I hope you can see how, coming from my perspective, Visual Studio is like the greatest thing since sliced bread.
"Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories." - Steven Wright
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And here I am doing the complete reverse. I started programming, using all the libraries microsoft gave me. Now I try to do everything myself because those generic libraries are never doing the exact thing I want them to do, or I simply wonder how to do it myself.
By now I use almost no 3rd party libraries and instead build everything from scratch.
I found my way.
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EveryNameIsTakenEvenThisOne wrote: By now I use almost no 3rd party libraries and instead build everything from scratch.
I think it helps to do that sometimes. If you have good working knowledge of the lower layers of software, then I believe that you will be able to produce more reliable products. I think the trick is to use the automation to do the majority of the work, then tweak the parts that don't quite "cut it". That seems to be the best balance for me anyway.
On the other hand, you have different fingers. - Steven Wright
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Yes, there is that bloat problem to deal with.
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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You were already doing that to some degree in your 30 years. I notice that you mentioned using the winsock library. If you were true-to-form, you would have written that yourself, as well.
So, welcome aboard and thanks for sacrificing your NIH-itis to the Byte-God. 
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Most of that isn;t VS - it's the frameworks that VS supports and makes it easy for you to use: You would get the same libraries and functions using Notepad and a manual compilation - there are those that develop C# apps that way, though I'm not one of them.
But I came from the same roots as you - my first "real" job was assembly code (Z80) for Visual Display Terminals, so we did everything ourselves. But I learned the value of a library of tested, working, generic code that I could "plug in" to my applications, and the current .NET framework is the same thing though on a much larger scale!
And VS is indeed awesome! The best IDE I've ever met - I would have killed for the debugger alone back in the day!
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Atom[^] is pretty good too.
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Atom is nice (the Visual Studio Code itself is based on its shell), but it's miles away from Visual Studio...
Also I'm a very old user of Notepad++ so atom, sublime, etc. are never my first choice.
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It's not meant to be a comparison to VStudio.
It's more like Notepad++, except I think NPP doesn't have the notion of looking at the directory as a project...
I like notepad++, and use it daily for simple editing tasks
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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