Something I'd like to see (although it might need a reworking of your current logic stuffs...) is quicker start times. Or to be more precise, faster discovery. Maybe it is just odd on my computer and nobody elses, but starting the application takes 5 seconds before the window appears. Refreshing the view locks the application up for 5 seconds. I suspect the reason is two-fold: I have a lot of devices, and you test them all one by one. My guess is that if you did each drives discovery in a separate thread, it would take less than a second. (Of course, once you get 26 drives in your machine, it might seem a bit taxing in the threads department for a second, but given that it is pretty much all I/O blocking there ought to be no problems with a mere 26 threads.)-worstje
5 seconds? Wow! (that sucks) But I think I might know why (and it's something I'm already working). Initially I just listed all the drives as a starting point because it makes it easier to find out if any of them have any bad habits. Like the Floppy drives (of which you have 2), that have several ... Which are unavoidable.
The floppy on my machine at the office grunts every 3 seconds (when it's empty), for about a second, which effectively makes the refresh cycle 4 seconds. Even when it isn't empty there seems to be a bit of a lag while it's being addressed before the rest can get their turn (most of which are quite fast). The optical drives while lightning fast compared to the floppys, really aren't part of the space we need to keep track of. That and I'm pretty sure that tagging it every X seconds would screwup a burn.
So I'm making the drives that are displayed and totaled selectable, and optical & floppy drives will be deselected by default. Also optical, floppy, and network drives will be removed from the local machine drive space totals by default. Which should make the load times much faster without adversely effecting the over all functionality (i think).
Mind you I'm not adverse to the multi-thread option, I just want to try this first.
The reason why I'd like this is because I think this app really has a lot of potential. I have a habit of running out of diskspace on some drive or another, and the explorer Computer window is annoying with all of its disks that don't matter to me in that situation.-worstje
I think that fits well with the above plan, yes?
Additionally, assuming you don't have plans already, I'd suggest double-click opening the drive in question and the rightclick on an item translating to a rightclick in Explorer. (The right-click stuff I can help you with; I've got experience with those APIs from my Cautomaton entry last year.) Oh, and how about a volume names column? -worstje
Volume Names? I thought we were trying to make this faster?? (hehe - jk) I've actually been thinking about this, but was more aimed toward making it part of a more in-depth drive properties/details dialog when a drive was double clicked.
Translating the Explorer rightclicks & opening drive file views is a little outside the intended scope of the project. That is more in the loader/launcher territory. But I haven't even started on that part of the code yet so nothing is carved in stone at this pont.