I don’t like splashscreens, but…
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
…I’ve just added one to Home Document Manager.
.Net isn’t renowned for it’s cold startup times, and WPF
apps start like standard .Net app after a horse tranquilizer. Home
Document Manager has an ever increasing list of assemblies that it
needs to import at startup and that takes time. This is on top of the
whole WPF stack.
.Net 3.5 SP1 introduced a new SplashScreen
class. You can set the SplashScreen by adding an image to your project
and setting its build properties, or you can use the class directly. I
find this new class a little flaky, as it can throw exceptions under
certain circumstances if it loses focus.
It does raise the question of what to show on a splash screen. Just a fancy graphic/logo? Version info? Website info?
I didn’t even know that you had released Home Document Manager. We
finally got a scanner, so I want to try it out on our mounds of
documents.
Show the name of the registered user. It might add to the cumulative guilt of ’sharing’ someone else’s licence key.
@Hector – be my guest.
@Andy – would be nice, but to sidestep the .Net load times, I can
display only a static image. I could modify the PNG when the user
activates, but it sounds like work…