Thursday, August 26, 2010

File Size On Disk: The Next Generation

Several trillion years ago I wrote an OWL-based C++ application (yeah, that's the Borland [now Embarcadero] Object Window Library, a fondly-missed object-oriented wrapper around the Windows UI that put MFC to shame, now maintained in open-source as OWLNext) which I meant as a personal tool to try to find out where the disk space on a drive was being used; I called it Disk Inspector.  It served me well for quite a long time.  But that application is now not behaving well on recent versions of Windows and seems to be creating Windows Data Execution Prevention errors upon execution .

So I've been meaning to update the application, preferably in C#, but the framework just doesn't offer tools with which to determine disk usage accurately enough.  Googling tonight has yielded this gem: http://foldersize.sourceforge.net/.  The source code is available, and I fully intend to snarf it to re-create Disk Inspector TNG (or something less silly) in C++... but now... what UI framework in C++?  Do I p/invoke it from .NET?  Scary.  Do I learn whatever VS2010's C++ UI normally uses?  I can't imagine doing so.  Download Turbo C++ (if we can still do that) and use VCL again?    What to do, what to do...

[Update 7/15/2011]
What to do?  Why, you lazy bugger, just keep googling for free software that does what you want it to do; in this case, use Disktective.  (Cheater pants.)

1 comment:

  1. Hello,

    If you upgrade the application from OWL to OWLNext, this should solve the problem with the Data Execution Prevention - OWLNext was rewritten to fix this issue.

    Jogy

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