Repair a LG L2000C Monitor

As I mention in my previous post I now have 3 broken monitor that should be easy to fix.

Two of the monitors are a LG L2000C monitors. They have a resolution of 1600x1200 and are using a IPS panel with good viewing angle. That makes them very good for the edge locations in a multi monitor setup.

The Pile Of Broken Monitors.

You can not have to many monitor, and when programming you need at least two to be efficient so at my developing machine at home I got three. Because three is always better then two.

I had a LG Flatron L246WH that is 24" with the resolution of 1920x1200, And the I had two LG L2000C 20" with the resolution of 1600x1200 and last two are also IPS panels with good viewing angle that is really good for monitor that are at the edges in a multi-monitor setup.

The nice thing about the screens is that they all are 1200 pixel in height. Almost all newer cheaper monitors are only 1080 in height and the extra 120 pixel in height is really nice and I really prefer it.

Then 1.5 year ago (Around March or April in the year 2011) the bigger of them, The 24" screen started to acting up. When start it up the power light was blink for a while before it started. And the time it was blinking before actually showing a picture got longer and longer. After around a month it took 3-4 minutes for it to start. And one day the monitor would never stop blinking, It did not start.

MZCrumbBar v1.5

I notice that I had not published the updates for my MZCrumbBar MFC Controller. So It was time to push out a new update. (Yes, MFC is actually still alive.)

This is a C++ MFC controller for Windows desktop development. It will allow you to present a clickable crumbbar. It does not have to be path it can also any string that is separated by a separator. 

Read more about it on the project page

Changes

There are 2 minor updates since v1.3.

The first change is an addition from Added by Iain Clarke that is good if you do some custom drawing.
The second change is a fix from me, It fixes a crash that happen in a rare situation. The inplace controller destroys and delete is self when losing focus.And in rare situations can you receive WM_KILLFOCUS before OnCreate on completed.

This controller won "Best C++/MFC article of March 2010" on CodeProject.com

The article there is not yet updated

Building Multi Commander with VS2012

Since the C++ compiler in VS2012 do support a lot more of the new C++11 standard, this is a compiler that I want to move over to. So I spent some time upgrading the Multi Commander project so that it can be built with the new C++ compiler.
( C++ news in VS2012 )

The upgrade was almost flawless. Their was only some minor issue to get my VS2010 projects to be built with VS2012. Like I had to upgrade WTL to version 8.1 (I had not upgraded this in a while so it was about time anyway) and also some other minor issue.

Multi Commander builds pretty clean, no warnings with the exception of some 3de party code. (zlib/bzip2)
With VS2012 I do however get a couple of more warnings, most of them are
 "warning C4702: unreachable code" VS2012 is a lot better at finding unreachable code.

Build Time

The build time is a little longer with VS2012, But that was expected since VS2012 support so much more and optimize code a lot better then VS2010 (Like the auto vectorizer), Not that I think it will be noticeable in Multi Commander since it is not very CPU consuming anyway.

Multi Commander v2.7

Multi Commander 2.7 is finally out.

This version has over 180+ changes since last version (2.5.1)

Read more and then download it

VS2012 Get XP Support for C++

It is incredible. Something happen that I would never believe would happen.

Microsoft and the Visual Studio Team actually listen to feedback and changed their decision about Windows XP support for C++ application in VS2012.

Their have been a uproar among developers that applications built with VS2012 did not run on Windows XP. Since a lot of businesses still uses Windows XP a lot of developers still need to support it. And the biggest reasons for C++ developers to upgrade to VS2012 is to get the new C++11 features.
But without XP support that would not be possible.

But they have now changed their mind.

Multi Commander v2.5

Multi Commander 2.5 is finally out.

This version has over 345+ changes since last version (2.1.2)

Read more and then download it