C# Application settings

Had a play around with the Click once installer the other day and it seems quite straightforward to use. Instead of being installed in a particular directory, the application is installed within the user folders. It then has none of the rights problems when writing files. When a new version is installed, the application is put in a new path with some randomly generated guid folder name. This gives a problem when trying to take across previous versions of property settings. The following code will solve the problem quite simply.

A resolution to improve my Greek….again

Every few years I resolve to go and see my friends in Greece again, and of course I need to be able to speak to them and their friends. Each year I struggle to learn a few more words and remember a bit more grammar; I’ve seen most of the books and tried most of the systems, but it takes real effort to get any progress. My brain isn’t the correct shape for language training! Perhaps by making it more public, it will become more of a commitment. I doubt it, but at least I’ll leave some things here that may help other make some progress. I’ve put some of the word lists here in a format usable by Anki, the latest application that I’m using to learn words with. It’s free for most formats, but is worth a donation. This year I’m going o start with the kypros.org lessons and then go back to the Hellenic American Union scripts which are more of a challenge. They are podcasts and are easy to use. Kypros-Net should do the same with their audio.

Kontact touch screen plugins for VizRT

I’ve been working on software for touch screens recently. We’ve created a variety of systems that have been automated for the production teams to drive, with a series of C# web services through IIS, a set of javascript scripted web pages and the graphics produced from VizRT. Normally we would have had to script much of the interaction using Viz’s fairly primitive version of vbScript which has little in the way of modern development tools. What has helped has been the use of a TUIO gateway and and a set of plugins from Pete Lane at Kenziko. Their Kontact suite of plugins allow very easy interaction to be used by a Viz designer; a lot of the interaction can be done without any scripting at all. I’ve been putting together some documentation for them, which they should have available by now.

XBox controller with C#

Just testing the interface with an XBox controller for the a Boxing punch counter app, so these are a few notes of what I’m using.

Main drivers for the XBox controller are downloaded from the Microsoft site, http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/d/xbox-360-wireless-controller-for-windows I used the 32 bit version with Windows XP and I tested with the wireless version. Under another test with Windows 7, the drivers updated automatically when the wifi section was plugged into the USB port.

I looked at some examples and decided to use the SlimDX open source C# interface, rather than a full XNA library. It’s lightweight and we don’t need all the 3D facilities of the full XNA sdk. We’ll start with that and see how it goes. The SDK details are here, http://slimdx.org/ and it may be downloaded here, http://code.google.com/p/slimdx/downloads/detail?name=SlimDX Runtime for .NET 2.0 28September 2011%29.msi This needs to be installed. It’s a .msi file. They may be producing an update for .Net 4.0 soon, so keep a check.

This is a simple example that works from this guy, http://visualcsharp.webs.com/projectdownloads.htm

Latest node.js, npm, express and jade

I’ve been dabbling with these over the last few months and trying to make some time to use them in some new projects, but they’ve been making great strides recently and it has been hard to keep up with all the developments. I tried to update to node.js v0.5 but in the end got confused with the different mixes of versions between older projects. I’d had some problems installing some of the modules with various dependencies. I decided to start again with the latest on all fronts. It has shown me how different it has become. express has a guide here, http://expressjs.com/guide.html but I just want to give you something simple. Using version 5 should be more compatible with the soon to be released v6, as well.

I’ve been working on a C# driver for node, on Windows, using 5.8 exe which is impressive, but in the following install I’m working on a Mac.

The node modules may now be held within the project directories, rather than centrally, which gives more flexible versioning and the projects are growing together to allow a variety of templating and css engines.

Panasonic 152″ 4k screen

I was lucky to have an hour or two away from my desk to go and see this little beauty. I visited the Panasonic demo rooms at Pinewood with Liam Norris from PSCo who move it around the country. This screen would have to be my choice for the next TV in the back room. I can’t wait to do some demos on there; at a resolution of 4k x 2k it should make the graphics look great.

Using the C# httpServer with raised events

I am writing some applications at the moment which require a lot of data gathering and there are a number of people at the events who want to be able to see this data while it is being collected. I have TCP socket connections for the main data collection and these pass their data to a central server. In order to avoid having to create further clients to access the collected data, I decided to run a small web server as part of the central server and just create web pages to view the data. Other people would then be able to edit and style these pages without any interference from me. As it happens there were no others available, so the users had to put up with my web design.

I made a class based around the MSDN sample and comments, but wanted to extend it in two ways; firstly, I needed to be able serve up the full gamut of binary files for any of the image types in the documents; secondly, I wanted to allow a command to be sent to the hosting application, via an http command. I added an event handler to do this. This would then decouple any application logic from being involved on the web side. I can also use it to report unknown file requests.

Augmented reality conference

This was an Augmented reality event arranged by Lester Madden of the augmentedplanet blog. Sorry about the following being so scrappy. I haven’t had time to much more than copy my notes to the post. Didn’t want to lose them, but they won’t mean much to anyone out there. Maybe the links will be useful. There’s a lot happening in this space, but I’m not sure how useful it will be until it becomes a lot easier to use. Implementing the technical side is getting easier; the phone side of things is more difficult for anyone other than a dedicatedAR geek. I was taken most by the demo from the guy using Unity3D. All built in, so easy to produce.

GoogleIO conference with Arduino

Interesting tio see what the direction that Google is going. Lots of Android with the upcoming Honeycomb tablet version, but not much TV this year. They have been pressured by the networks, who are not too keen to give them any access to their content. Samsung and SMART TV will still have some sort of chance of survival in this case.

Chrome box looks good. If that has a decent graphics hardware base, we could find it cheap enough for connected screen displays.

One thing that I found really interesting, (but not sure how practical) was the android accessory development kit. It’s based on an Arduino, which I’ve been playing around with using node.js. I’ve not had the time to do much more than the usual Hello World of blinking lights, but it should give a real boost to the Arduino guys. Well done to them for all their efforts.

All the usual videos are here, http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sessions.html

Mix 2011

The keynote this year was interesting for what was not spoken about. Lots of talk in the main keynote but nothing about Silverlight. All the talk is about HTML5 and the speed of the new IE9 browser. On the Second day’s keynote, they talked about Win7 mobiles and then Scott showed that he has been moved into the critical area of IE9. It shows that Microsoft are showing that the critical arena for competition is more on the web platform over the coming year.

Time to look at some more Javascript, I think. CSS video should be interesting. jQuery should only become more popular.

More later…