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C# Extension Methods and Fluent Interfaces
07 February 13 03:42 AM | pavely | 1 comment(s)

The idea of fluent interfaces is not new, and has many forms. The basic idea is to use a single statement to encompass a series of operations that are natural, or at least simple, to use. There are very few fluent interfaces in .NET – the most well known, which has some fluent interface semantics, is the System.Text.StringBuilder class. Here’s a simple example: public static string BuildInfo(Process process) { return new StringBuilder( "Process " ) .AppendLine(process.ProcessName) .Append...

תגים:.NET, C#, C# 3.0, DEV, C# 4.0, Fun, C# 5.0

Windows Phone 8 is soon upon us (and MS Israel hands out 7.5 phones)
09 September 12 09:30 PM | pavely | with no comments

(this is not my typical technical post, but it’s nice to have something different for a change) A few days ago Microsoft and Nokia held a press conference in New York, in which Nokia presented two new phone devices running Windows Phone 8 : The Lumia 820 and the Lumia 920 . This announcement made a short while after Samsung announced its first WP8 device, the ATIV S . You can watch the press conference video here . The 920 sure looks impressive in style and functionality. Windows Phone 8 is expected...

תגים:DEV, Fun, Windows Phone

Windows Phone: Playing Sound Effects
03 September 12 01:25 PM | pavely | with no comments

I wanted to create a simple timer application for Windows Phone . The timer would count backwards from a user configured value and when it reached zero, it would play some sound effect to indicate expiration. Sounds simple enough… This is how the application looks like: The problem turned out to be playing that sound effect. I had a WAV file I wanted to play. Silverlight has a MediaElement object that is capable of playing video and/or audio, so it seemed to be a good candidate for the job. MediaElement...

תגים:.NET, XNA, C#, Silverlight, DEV, Fun, Games, Audio, Windows Phone

Console Calculator with Roslyn (Part 2)
08 August 12 02:39 PM | pavely | with no comments

In the first part we created a simple enough calculator, but it lacked two features I wanted to have: 1. work with degrees or radians in trigonometric functions. 2. allow simple variables to be used without first declaring them. Let’s see how we can implement these features, starting with the first. Trigonometric functions work in radians, which is sometimes inconvenient.What we need is a way to change the parameter to the trigonometric functions by multiplying it by PI/180 if degrees was requested...

תגים:.NET, C#, PARSING, DEV, Fun, Roslyn, Visual Studio 2012

Towers of Hanoi–WPF Style (Part 2)
13 February 12 10:45 PM | pavely | with no comments

In the first part , we saw how to recursively solve the Towers of Hanoi problem in C#. In this post I want to show a graphic view of the solution. This is a starting position with 7 discs: This is how it looks when the problem is solved: In between, the discs move with animation from pole to pole, as the solution dictates. Options include speeding up the process (with the slider, very useful), pausing the animation and resetting to the initial state. Here’s something in the middle: The Poles The...

תגים:.NET, C#, DEV, XAML, Fun, WPF, Graphics, Algorithms

Towers of Hanoi–WPF Style (part 1)
11 February 12 10:43 PM | pavely | 3 comment(s)

I remember many years ago (at least 15), I was learning Prolog . I used the “Turbo Prolog” package from (what was once) Borland. One of the nice examples there was a solution of the Towers of Hanoi , with a simple animation that showed the steps graphically. This was all textual graphics (today’s Console windows), but it was impressive (at least it impressed me). Prolog was used to show off its AI capabilities, which are, in fact, a recursive, backtracking engine. No matter; we can do it in C#. Towers...

תגים:.NET, C#, DEV, Fun, WPF, Mathematics, Algorithms

A New Android Game in Town (by my brother)
05 February 12 10:36 PM | pavely | 4 comment(s)

Anyone who has ever written a game knows it’s hard to get it done from start to finish. Sure, I can put on a demo of some game I’ve created in several hours. But creating all the graphics, sound, animation, levels, transitions, scoring, etc, from start to finish is quite a challenge, especially for a single developer. That’s why I’m very proud of my young brother, Yaniv , that has worked hard for the past 10 months (while maintaining a proper day job!) on an awesome fun game called Micro Wars , targeted...

תגים:Fun, Graphics, OFFTOPIC, TECH, Games, Android

Calculating PI in .NET
30 December 11 10:31 PM | pavely | 2 comment(s)

I always loved mathematics. Although I’m certainly not a mathematician by profession, I’m always intrigued and inspired by math’s pureness and cleverness. One of the simplest and fascinating aspects of math is the number PI . Described simply as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, it’s a constant with infinite digits after the decimal point and most importantly, non repeating (at least as far as I know). There are many ways to calculate PI, as evident within the PI Wikipedia link...

תגים:C#, LINQ, DEV, Fun, BigInteger, Numerics, .NET 4, Mathematics

Windows Phone: Combining Silverlight & XNA in a Single Page
26 October 11 09:30 PM | pavely | 2 comment(s)

There are two very distinct ways to program on Windows Phone 7.x: Silverlight & XNA. Silverlight is about UI, retained graphics and is event driven. XNA is about immediate mode graphics, based on a timer and polling; Very different models indeed. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. One of the new features in WP7.1 (“mango”) is the ability to combine the two to get the best of both worlds. Here’s a typical scenario where this need may come up: suppose you’re developing an XNA game (2D or 3D...

תגים:XNA, C#, Silverlight, DEV, XAML, Fun, Graphics, Windows Phone

Porting an XNA game from Windows to Windows Phone (Part 2)
14 August 11 03:40 PM | pavely | 2 comment(s)

In the first part we got our introduction screen up and running, with the starfield scrolling by. However, we couldn’t actually start playing because the game was waiting for a key press… which is nowhere to be found on a Windows Phone device. We simply need a little touch. Adding Touch Support Touch is something the XNA version of Windows and XBOX 360 have no notion of. This is specific for Windows Phone. Touch input information is available as “raw” data (touch points, with positions, etc.) and...

תגים:XNA, C#, DEV, Fun, Graphics, Games, Windows Phone

Porting an XNA game from Windows to Windows Phone (Part 1)
08 August 11 09:58 PM | pavely | 2 comment(s)

XNA is one of the two APIs that’s supported on Windows Phone 7 (the other being Silverlight), so a natural thing to do is to port an already existing XNA game (running on Windows or XBOX 360) to the new Windows Phone 7 platform. I wanted to see how easy (or maybe not so easy) it would be to do the actual porting. My starting point is a relatively simple 2D game, the one developed throughout the XNA 2D tutorial I did a some months back. We’ll start with the final game project (discussed in the last...

תגים:XNA, DEV, Fun, Visual Studio 2010, Games, Windows Phone

Technology Radio Show, Part 2
21 March 11 10:03 AM | pavely | 3 comment(s)

The second part of the technology radio show on 106.4 FM aired on last Thursday. As with the first part , I was the “Microsoft guy”. This time we were missing the iPhone and Ruby guys, but the show was more to the point (somewhat). You can listen to the recording (if you’re kinda really really bored) here (look for the March 17 show).

תגים:C++, .NET, C#, thoughts, DEV, Fun, Azure, Audio

Technology Radio show that I participated in
02 March 11 08:40 PM | pavely | 2 comment(s)

Last week I was invited to a radio show called “Technofobia” (origin in Hebrew) in the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Hertzliya (Israel) (106.4 FM). This was a “special” talk about development technologies. There was a Ruby guy, a Python guy, a C++ guy (actually a girl), an iPhone guy (the famous Yossi Taguri ) and myself, as the “Microsoft guy”. I had to repeatedly (and during the music breaks) tell the hosts that I don’t work at Microsoft, I just use, teach, mostly like and develop with those...

תגים:C++, .NET, C#, thoughts, DEV, Fun, Audio

COM Fun with Microsoft Agent
25 February 11 03:44 PM | pavely | 1 comment(s)

Whenever I teach COM interoperability in .NET, I try to show some nice demo for this. The classic is to use one of the Office applications (such as Word) to do some automation by creating a document, adding some text, etc. This is effective enough but not really fun. A much more fun way is to use the Microsoft Agent technology. MS Agent is discontinued as far as further development is concerned, but it’s still fun and great for (at least) learning purposes. What is MS Agent? Its most well known appearance...

תגים:COM, .NET, C#, Interop, DEV, Fun, 64 bit, MS Agent

XNA 2D Game Tutorial (Part 14–Last)
31 December 10 06:54 PM | pavely | 9 comment(s)

Previous posts in this series: Part 1 : Getting started Part 2 : Drawing something Part 3 : Input handling Part 4 : Game Components Part 5 : Animation and Sprites Part 6 : Handling Projectiles Part 7 : Sound Effects Part 8 : Setting Up Data Part 9 : Creating Aliens Part 10 : Collision Detection Part 11 : More Collisions Part 12 : Displaying Text Part 13 : Game States Over the past posts, we’ve created a game. A simple game, for sure, but the objective was learning XNA, not creating the greatest game...

תגים:XNA, DEV, Fun, Games