Folks, back in 2002 the last significant C++ app I wrote had a "logging" control which looked and moved in a very similar way to the cmd.exe window. I was just looking at the 300 lines of code I wrote back then it's quite complicated as I'm doing everything to paint the control contents. I'm creating the illusion of a cmd style window over a large buffer of messages (up to a few thousand), I maintain the positions of scrollbars, I draw lines in different colours, I can adjust the font and metrics and I use ScrollWindow API for fast motion. It created the illusion of blazing fast scrolling. I've pasted below a shot of what the C++ control used to look like.
I'd like to create a similar control in Managed code, but quite honestly I don't know how. I just don't know what techniques to use to get the rapid scrolling feeling. If you were told to write a "logging" control that behaved like the cmd.exe window, what techniques would you consider? I could wrap the old C++ control code as an ActiveX control, but I've never needed to do that before and I'm not sure how tricky it is. I'll evaluate that idea now. Greg
<<image001.png>>
