Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day: 02/25/2007

Friday, March 02, 2007

30 Videos for the New Programmer & XNA Developer

"XNAtutorial.com provides video instructions for beginners wanting to get into game programming."

These 30 videos, hours of content, were put together by an amateur programmer, Joran Omark, who is learning to program, using XNA as his motivator.

It's introductory content, great for someone who is just learning to program and who wants to get up to speed on XNA.

The videos/source/etc are downloadable, so easy to view and use offline.

For more ringing endorsements, check out the extremely positive post comments...

(via Miguel Campos Blog - XNA Tutorial)

IM Your Way to A Better World

Windows Live Spaces - The i'm Initiative and new secret emoticon

"The i'm Initiative is the most exciting piece of news I have had to share with Messenger users since I started working on Messenger over 3 years ago and there has been tons of exciting news over the last 3 years. Now if you are like me and are a Lost fan if you hear The <anything> Initiative your mind immediately jumps to the DHARMA Initiative and you assume it must be bad and very mysterious. The i'm Initiative is completely the opposite, it is very good and all the previous mystery around the secret emoticon in Messenger 8.1 will be revealed below.

...

Wonderful! How does it work?

Use Messenger 8.1

Add the i'm emoticon to your display name by entering the code of the cause you would like to support (hint: I suggest adding it at the end of your name so you still appear in the correct alphabetic order in your contacts list)

Send and receive IMs

A portion of the advertising revenue generated by your usage of Messenger will be donated to your cause. So the more IMs you send and receive the more money will be donated to your cause.

note: currently the donation only applies to Windows Live Messenger users in the United States. If you are in the US and you are IMing with a contact in another country your IM activity will be counted towards the donation.
...
What are the i'm emoticon codes and causes?

American Red Cross -- ready to help, code = *red+u

Boys & Girls Clubs of America -- providing a positive place for kids, code = *bgca

National AIDS Fund -- fighting AIDS, code = *naf

National MS Society -- joining the MS movement, code = *mssoc

ninemillion.org -- helping 9 million refugee kids, code = *9mil

Sierra Club -- exploring and protecting the planet, code = *sierra

StopGlobalWarming.org -- stopping global warming, code = *help

Susan G. Komen for the Cure -- finding the cure, code = *komen

UNICEF -- helping kids survive, code = *unicef

...
This sounds too good to be true - sort of like that e-mail I got about Bill Gates sending me a Million dollars if I forward the email onto 10 friends and they send it on to 10 friends, etc. How do I know this is really true?
You can check out the official i'm Initiative website -- http://im.live.com -- and the causes will have information on their websites as well.
..."

I know... I thought it was a hoax thing too, but it looks legit.

Now every IM I send, the American Red Cross gets a live money love from Microsoft... ;)

(via Scott Elkin - Donate To Charity Using MSN Messenger 8.1)

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Vista/Office 2007 Preview Handler Pack - Preview Handlers for .CS, .ASPX, *.SQL

Enter the Tatrix - Vista and Office 2007 Preview Handler Pack released

"I’m in love with the new preview functionality in Vista and Office 2007, however its usefulness is limited by the small number of file types it will actually preview. Over the weekend, I set out to start fixing this by implementing preview handlers for the files I use every day - like .cs and .aspx.

..."

This Preview Handler Pack, while released in December 2006, is still pretty darn cool sounding...

(via Danie Bruwer - Vista and Office 2007 Preview Handler Pack released)

Related Past Post XRef:
Preview Handler Framework

Visual Studio 2005 SDK version 4.0 Released

Microsoft Downloads - Visual Studio 2005 SDK version 4.0

"...

This is the official Visual Studio 2005 software development kit that allows developers to integrate tools, editors, designers, languages, and much more inside Visual Studio 2005. It adds the following features: VS SDK Browser, Package Load Analyzer, Toolbox Control Installer together with a toolbox control installation sample, a redistributable package for Toolbox component vendors that simplifies deployment, a new tool for generating managed class library documentation (Sandcastle), an updated Setup experience, a new toolbar combo box sample, new integration tests for the EditorWithToolbox sample that use the VsIdeHostAdapter and much more.

..."

Interesting to see Sandcastle is included...

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Orcas March 2007 CTP VPC Released

Microsoft Downloads - Microsoft Pre-release Software Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" - March 2007 Community Technology Preview (CTP)

"...

This download is the March 2007 Community Technology Preview of Microsoft Visual Studio Code-Named “Orcas”. This CTP is available in English only.
..."

The updates in this CTP are just too numerous to post here... Many of the cool VB9 features are now implemented (XML Literals, etc).

I still expect Orcas/VS2007(or will it be VS2008? I'll bet on VS2007... To keep within the two year cycle...) to be released (or at least its released will announced and the code will be gold) at this year's PDC. I

It just makes sense (to me at least) to release the next VS at PDC, doesn't it? (Wouldn't it be cool to get a new VS at each PDC, i.e. once every two years?)

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Determine if an Outlook Appointment/Calendar Item has been DST Rebased.

The CDOs and CDONTS of Messaging Development - OUTBOX: How to tell if the DST Rebasing Tool has been run on a mailbox?

"The rebasing tool adds time zone information to appointments that it touches. This time zone information is the same that Outlook 2007 (and patched versions of CDO 1.21) puts on appointments when it creates them. These time zone structures are described here...

http://blogs.msdn.com/stephen_griffin/archive/2006/12/06/outlook-2007-timezone-structures.aspx

What that means is that we cannot discern between appointments that were touched by the rebasing tool and ones that were created or modified by “new” clients (Outlook 2007 or DST patched versions of CDO 1.21). There isn’t any marking on the mailbox itself so what you would have to do is iterate through items in the calendar folder and look for these properties on calendar items. If they exist on any appointment in the calendar then you know that the rebasing tool and/or “new” clients have been there.

..."

Oh yeah, I'm going to need this code snip in the near future...

Team Foundation Server Workspaces 101

Martin Woodward - Workspace 101: An introduction to TFS Workspaces

"One of the concepts that people need to understand when they begin to work with Team Foundation Server Version Control is that of the Team Foundation Server (TFS) Workspace. So I thought I would write a series of blog-posts covering the basics of TFS workspaces, with this post being the first. This information may be a little basic to many of the people who read my blog (especially this first post) and it is just a write up of how I think about workspaces and how I explain the concept to others. If you have any additional information to add or comments to make then please do. Also, if you are new to TFS then you probably want to take a read of the help documentation over at MSDN and in the Teamprise User Guide as there is some great information there on this topic.

..."

As a previous (well current, for some projects... sigh) SourceSafe user, TFS Workspaces was one of those things I had (am still) wrapping my head around.

This post provides some great info on workspaces and how they work. I'm looking forward to the rest in the series...

Free XNA Book

LearnXNA - XNA Book All Chapters

"XNA Book
By Mike Fleischauer

Chapter one is about XNA in general, what you need to get started and explains what the initial templates give you. Finally, I explain what pieces you need to get started on your way towards game programming.

Chapter two is about basic 2D graphics. I walk through how to draw graphics to the screen, the basics behind 2D graphics and finally how to create transparent sprites.

Chapter three we are going to learn the basics of controlling our games. We cover simple keyboard, mouse and gamepad interaction. This is also where you are going to have to make your first hard decision about how your game is going to play.

Chapter four, we are going to learn the basic of music and sound effects. We cover the use of the Microsoft Cross-Platform Audio Creation Tool (wow, that’s a mouth full). Then we learn how to take the files generated by this tool to play sounds and music in our game programmatically." [Description leached in full]

Even though it's a ways away we've already assigned my son his Summer Project, design and build a simple XNA game for both a PC and our XBox.

His first step is to learn to program in C# and mine is to learn XNA (with a side helping of C# learning)...

The above XNA book from LearnXNA looks like a good starting point for me. In total it's 76 pages, with just enough pictures to make the given point and focused code snips (i.e. no/little generated code). It's well written, in a conversational style, the PDF's are printable and the price is perfect...

(via Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information from Alfred Thompson - XNA Links)

Gilma - GUI for ILMerge Branched for .Net 2.0

Code Project - Gilma - Gui for the ILMerge Application revised for .Net 2.0

"

I have seen the beatiful interface made from Tomer Shalev in the SourcForce web site and thought I could revrite it in a self contained way. The original Tomer Shalev's Gilma is a front-end application to ILMerge: Microsoft's command-line utility that can be used to merge multiple .NET assemblies into a single assembly. ILMerge is freely available from Microsoft's web site.

ILMerge's license does allow commercial usage.

In my Implementation whose snapshot you can see in the picture I have referenced the ILMerge executable directly in visual Studio 2005.

..."

I keep meaning to play with ILMerge... I tried it once when creating my WLW plugins but ran into issues (like WLW wouldn't recognize my ILMerged plugin). I'm sure it was probably some stupid I was doing, but I didn't have the time to troubleshoot it.

Still I really like the idea of providing a single file that includes all my related/child/dependant/etc assembles...

Monday, February 26, 2007

Universal Data Type Conversion Checker Function

.Net Slave - Universal data type checker

"In many different scenarios we need to check if a string can be converted into an integer e.g. This could be when we work with query strings and need to check if they match a certain data type. In VB.NET you can use the IsNumeric and IsDate functions, but that's about it. You are left to your own data type checking logic the rest of the time. It would be cool if we could have a method that could check all data types that is represented by strings such as integers, guids, booleans etc.

Here is a method that does just that. It can check all the string based types and also enums.
...
Let's try some different examples

CanConvert("12", typeof(int)); // returns true

CanConvert("f637a876-9d58-4229-9559-a5e42a95fdac ", typeof(Guid)); // returns true

CanConvert("Backspace", typeof(System.ConsoleKey)); // returns true

CanConvert("10px", typeof(System.Web.UI.WebControls.Unit)); // returns true

CanConvert("red", typeof(System.Drawing.Color)); // returns true"

You've got to love a cool hack...

This C# function (easily translatable into VB.Net) provides a simple, yet universal, type conversion checker function. Sort of like TryParse, but instead using System.ComponentModel.TypeConverter. Check the post out for the code...

(via Onion Peels - Links 2007-02-25)

Sunday, February 25, 2007

Website Thumbnail Windows Live Writer Plugin

DDITWeb - Windows Live Writer Plugins & Dirty Diapers!

"I've been playing around with Windows Live Writer for a little while now (since it first came out in beta!) and the more I use it, the better it seems to get (in case you haven't used it, I encourage you to check it out).

...

So what's the plugin called and where can I get it?

It's called "Insert Website Image" and you can download it from here!
All source code can also be downloaded from here!
..."

This is a pretty cool WLW Plugin...

My only issue is that my blog host doesn't support image uploading with WLW. Sounds like an opportunity to use my FlickrNet/Picture Post plugin experience doesn't it! ;)

(via Steve Clayton: Geek In Disguise - Windows Live Writer Plugin - website thumbnail)

Free Yahoo UI JavaScript Hosting

Niall Kennedy's Weblog - Yahoo! centralizes its JavaScript network with free hosting

"Yahoo! is opening up the JavaScript powering its websites a bit more tonight, encouraging developers to directly reference libraries on its servers from within their webpages. Yahoo! User Interface Hosting opens up versioned access to the popular YUI Library, creating faster load times for sites across the web using Yahoo's optimized, geo-distributed, and reliable data centers.

..."

That's a cool move by Yahoo and opens up some interesting opportunities for people who cannot host their own JS libraries (like many bloggers, myself included).

Hum...

Update:
More information from the horse's mouth, Free Hosting of YUI Files from Yahoo!

Related Past Post XRef:
Yahoo! UI Library Released as OSS