Today I did some of the preliminary work for Project Resistance (well I did it yesterday and today, but we'll call it Day 1).

As usual Smith, my go-to graphics guy for things like this, turned out images that were better than expected, so the app won't look like I did the graphics.  That's the first key to this project looking professional.

I did some preliminary inrastructure work for the application, setting up file layouts and the like.  I also did some quick work for drawing the blank resistor on a background as well:

As usual this was pretty painful - way more painful than it should be.  Trying to get alphablending/transparency working on Windows Mobile can be a huge chore.  It's even worse if you want a control (which is what the resistor is) to have a transparent background through which you can see the parent Form (which is where that green PCB image is drawn).

It involves calling back up to the parent and having it draw the clipping region under your control when the control paints itself.  Fortunately I'd run into this before and I had the code readily available.  Many thanks to Alex Feinman for figuring this out in the first place.

This is certainly something Microsoft needs to work on simplifying if they want the average developer to be able to achieve success.