Screen Shot Maker

[solowestside]

Thanks to MADINDUSTRIES for helping with this code:

It has a save feature so you can post the screen shot:



Download: http://mvdindustries.googlepages.com/screenshot.exe

+rep if you like

[MAD Industries]

Alright here goes,

1. Great Job! Huge improvement over the last few. I love how you figured out how to change the window title to "Screen Shot" instead of "Form1".

2. Incorporating the textboxes with the save feature was a perfect idea and shows that you have problem solving ability. (you used the "account name" box to fix the save path)

3. Unfortunately, the save feature wasnt made too well. Don't stress over it, it was a mistake that is resolved by experience. Pretty much, you need to remember to take into account that not everybody uses the same operating system. (In your case, Vista) You set the save to go to a direct path instead of a relative path. In Vista the path is C:\Users\MyAccount\Documents but in XP the path is C:\Documents And Settings\MyAccount\My Documents. So what do you expect your XP users to do? The program immediately crashes when they hit "save". There is a way to solve this though because when you are coding there is a command that automatically directs it to the documents folder of the open account no matter what operating system you are on. (I'll let you know how that is done through aim)

4. I recommend either scaling the picture to fit the picture box or allowing the users to scroll around the picture after it's taken to make sure they captured the way they wanted to capture it.

5. I also recommend that you allow some way to notify the user of where their screen shot has been saved to. (maybe you already included this. I wouldn't have been able to know since I could not save due to the Vista/XP incompatibility issue previously mentioned) Notifications may be something like a message box after it is saved or even having it automatically open the folder with the .gif file selected and ready for manipulation by other applications.

6. Just a tip: Before you release a program, try to crash it. Run it and click things in the wrong order. Put non-standard data into the boxes. Do whatever you can that a normal person is capable of doing to try to crash it. (do whatever comes to mind, people are lacking common sense these days) If you succeed in crashing it, then add code to prevent that crash the next time around. The harder your program is to crash, the more stable it will be and thus, the better programmer you are. Sometimes, with the smaller programs, I will spend more lines of code just making sure you cant break/crash the program than I do on the actual processing which the program is supposed to do. Stability takes time but is always worth it.

Alright, I think that's all. Good luck! Feel free to ask me any questions you like. That was intended to be purely educational.

EDIT: Bugs fixed, great job solo!



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[MAD Industries]

I updated the direct link btw ;)