Amir Shevat's Blog

OpenUp - Non-Paged CLR Host

Sasha Goldshtein and Alon Fliess have released a very interesting project called Non-Paged CLR Host to OpenUp , Microsoft open source competition. This project is a custom CLR host that can provide significant performance improvements for applications that consume large amounts of memory. This is accomplished by locking all CLR-allocated pages into physical memory. Running an application under this host can guarantee that paging will not occur even if other applications on the system are allocating...

Silverlight 2.0 training with Tamir Khason

We are holding a local Silverlight 2.0 training event at Microsoft Israel Development Center and the room is super full (round 140+ people). Tamir Khason's knowledge of Silverlight is phenomenal. Here is a first shot of the event: Up until now it looks very interesting :) If you've missed it, there is a second event .

Silverlight String-To-PathGeometry Converter

Alex Golesh has release String-To-PathGeometry Converter to OpenUp . About the project: "Silverlight 2 is great technology. But for some developers who used to work with WPF there are some missed helper classes, which are very handy. One of them is “PathFigureCollectionConverter” object, which accepts string with figure path definition and convert it to Geometry object. This project provides similar functionality for Silverlight 2: it accepts string with path definition, and return PathGeometry...

OpenUp - .NET Assembly Information

Rotem Bloom has submitted to openup a nice, small and free .NET tool that display useful information on .NET DLL (Assembly). The tool shows information like: 1) Compilation mode Debug\Release. 2) .NET Assembly full name. 3) .NET Assembly references. Thanks Rotem,

OpenUp - WCF Extras

Eyal Post has released an open source project to OpenUp called WCF Extras . WCF Extras is a collection of useful WCF extensions including Soap Header support, WSDL documentation etc. The WCF platform is very extensible and allows you to easily add features that are not part of the core product. This project contains some extensions needed in a WCF based project: SOAP Header support for WCF Adding WSDL Documentation from Source Code XML Comments Override SOAP Address Location URL Single WSDL file...

OpenUp - Adding a string to pictures

Sagi Levi has released a project to OpenUp that enables you to to add text to an image. If this is something you need or just interested in how it is done, check it out here . This reminds me of a cool web site where you can generate things like this: Thanks Sagi.

OpenUp - Sudoku, WPF Poker and SnakeX

We got 3 new games submitted to OpenUp , All these application are free and open source software: Gil Shinnar and Simon Grinberg have released WPF poker , a simple WPF base poker for local area networks. The project is developed under Visual Studio 2008 and uses .NET 3.5. Eyal Vardi has contributed a Sudoku Puzzle application. Omer Hanetz has released SnakeX , a Direct3D based snake game (using C# and .NET Framework 3.5). This game demonstrates basic DirectX usage. SnakeX uses basic Direct3D components...

Tipeysh! – VS Add-in that helps you create C/C++ header files on a single click.

Here is another OpenUp project, with an hilarious name: About Tipeysh - "Are you also feel miserable when you need to create a new header file in your Visual Studio C/C++ project? Repeatedly choosing "new header file", then writing the annoying (but needed) "#ifndef" section, then writing the class name with it's "private", "protected" and "public" access modifiers... too much clicks and typewriting! Well, there is a solution: Tipeysh! is...

OpenUp - DirectX Video Player

Yinon Eliraz has released a Video Player application to openup , our open source competition: This simple .NET based application allows you to control Video from the DirectX library. The code is designed in VisualBasic2008 - a NET framework, it is a simple and easy to understand. Using this Video player you can play many Video formats, inside the code there is, in addition to the Video controller, an Audio controller in which I decided not to use. The Video player have simple functions such as- Playing...

WebCam control for WPF, Silverlight controls library and Duplicate images finder

Tamir Khason has contributed a great set of projects to OpenUp, Microsoft open source competition . WebCam control for WPF : Reusable WPF control to display high frame rate video such as WebCam or framegrabber DirectShow output. This control uses InteropBitmap introduced in .NET framework 3.5 and managed DirectShow P/Invoke. This control does not uses DirectShow.net library, so it's completely independent. Silverlight controls library : This is the library of WPF (and not only WPF) controls,...

OpenUp – Share your code and win a trip to PDC

We have just lunched a new developer competition called OpenUp . The basic idea is to create a cool open source project and to enter it into the competition. The projects should be release to the open source through CodePlex and under the MSPL license. We have a web site that hosts the competition and references the projects in CodePlex. As for the prizes- · Every one that submits a project gets a cool T-shirt. · Every month we will pick the most popular project submitted that month from...

Don't you wish we were using your project to optimize VB2008?

In an interesting blog , about how VB2008 Outperforms VB2005, by Members of the VB team in Microsoft, I found this offer: "All times are found by performing operations on representative, large projects in XP. Don't you wish we were using your project to optimize our times? Send it in so that we can optimize for you! ( vbperf@microsoft.com ) We are always interested to get more customer projects for our testing. Is there another scenario you're interested that you don't see above...

Should we document our code?

One of my friends added this icon to his signature:  I personally believe in this statement: " Always write and document your code as if the man that is going to maintain it is a serial killer who knows where you live. "

JNI - not as fun as you would expect

Java Native Interface (JNI) is a way for java applications to load and invoke DLLs. Because java sources are available for the developer to step into during runtime(I wish we had that too in C#) you could see a lot of JNI calls. For example when you step into java socket you get a JNI call to a C++/C socket. One would think that it would be easy to call C++ from java, because of the multiple use of it in java itself, but it is NOT. You need to generate a .H file from the already compiled java class...

Interoperability matters - part 0

A long time ago, I started pondering about interoperability between different technologies. Now it is all becoming tangible, I just came back from the first session of “ JAVA - .NET interoperability team ”, we actually sat together and talked about the real-world problems and scenarios. It was great to see experts from the field, working on the same problem of interoperability from opposite sides, starting to talk and get to know each other. Once I get all the material from the session organized...