I paused a little on the DirectX development because the first objective had been achieved and also a technical obstacle that I cannot find a way to float a D3D window on the desktop.
Main while, I turned to a new project that aims to write a program to save the Windows LiveSpace blog and album contents. Actually, I wrote one a year ago but for Linux, now I'd like the same for Windows.
The function of the program is simple, it saves the LiveSpace blog and photos in the albums to local disk. The program works like a crawler, it obtains the html contents from the server and extract interested part from them, after all, I don't want to save the complex page with lots of useless links, banners...
This project will be a RAD. With .NET, I prefer managed C++.
Basically, I'd like it to be a GUI program, on the left, I'd like to have a TreeView that shows the blog titles grouped by months, photos grouped by albums, same as shown on the webpage. TreeView does not support multiple selection by itself, but one can write customized code to support that. For the first prototype, maybe using CheckBox is OK. On the right, I'll show the contents for selected blogs or photos. Then on the top of the main window, I'd like to have a strip that holds the input for LiveSpace username and the buttons for "Obtain" and "Save". So it is a very simple GUI doing simple things.
Obviously, I need to obtain the webpage from LiveSpace, I selected the WebBrowser control which is based on IE and is quite easy to use.
WebBrowser can parse the HTML into DOM, then we can use HtmlDocument obtained by WebBrowser::Document. In this way, it is easier to regenerate the HTML from the modified DOM to customize output.
As for the final step that is the actual save operation, I need to download the pic files appeared in the blogs as well as the photo files. I selected WebClient for the job.
Development is on going, first version coming soon. :D
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