WGS v0.3 – having problems

WGS v0.3 was supposed to demonstrate the possibility of having in game chat (XFire’s main feature) via notification of when you got a message in game (just a little overlay would popup). Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to get that to work, because I can’t seem to load additional DLL’s – signed or not – in WLM. The library I was playing to use to handle the overlays is Muhammad Haggag’s DirectDrawOverlayLib, which is a managed wrapper around unmanaged code.

Unfortunately, when trying to execute the code (any of the code…in this case, just creating an object of one of its types) I get errors. Specifically, using VS2008 Beta 2 to attach to MSNMGR.exe to debug, I get

The type initializer for ‘<Module>’ threw an exception.

The inner exception is:

{“Could not load file or assembly ‘msvcm90, Version=9.0.20706.1, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a’ or one of its dependencies. Failed to grant minimum permission requests. (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80131417)”:”msvcm90, Version=9.0.20706.1, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a”}

At the moment, my theory is that the unmanaged code is causing the issue. I was able to get a separate C# library (“hello, my name is test”) to function. I’m guessing msvcm90 isn’t in the GAC (since it has native code and all), so WLM is kicking up a fuss.
Unfortunately my attempts at removing the dependency on msvcm90 have so far been unsuccessful (they result in a few fatal errors), probably due to the nature of the library. If I can’t get this to work, I’m in way over my head trying to get it to work using purely managed DirectX, so it’ll cancel the project to some degree :(

When I discovered the performance hit in v0.1/0.2 because of WMI process watching, I decided I’d not release v0.3 until I’d fixed that at the very least. Unfortunately, I’m not really sure where to begin on that, so while it is on its way, it is being pushed onto the backburner for awhile.

WLM GameStatus v0.2

Update: Updated binaries and source code now available from Codeplex!

Okay, I said I’d have a bug fix out yesterday, but I didn’t get to it. On the plus side, it now uses DDE (see below), which is so much more cooler. I haven’t added any other game support, but opening the XML file is easy as usual.

Changes

• Now using DDE instead of MessengerClient API calls. This allows me to set the “Game” you’re playing in WLM, rather than changing your status
  This is much cooler because it means it doesn’t have to save your old status – it never overwrites it – and it looks cooler (see image below)

  

Bug Fixes

• The initial bug I had with WGS not saving configuration file only happened if you had Hellgate:London (Beta) installed. Removed second entry from XML, fixed.

What can I say? It is a minor point release ;)

Download v0.2

For installation instruction, read the previous post on WGS

WLM GameStatus v0.1

Update #2: Updated binaries and source code now available from Codeplex!

Update: this has been updated, I recommend you get the latest version by visiting the front page.

I’m a gamer, and I use Windows Live Messenger (why does this sound like an AA meeting?). I dislike it when people will start spamming talking to me asking questions like ‘whatcha up to?‘ while I’m playing a game. So, WLM GameStatus (WGS) will automatically set my Personal Message (PSM) to the name of whatever game I’m playing, and then revert back to what I had it when I close the game

Installation

Installation is a bit convoluted, since WLM Add-in support isn’t automatically enabled, that has to be done through the registry (step 2 & 3)

1. Download and extract Zip file
2. Open up RegEdit.exe
3. In HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSNMessenger, set AddInFeatureEnabled to 1
4. Create HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Aeoth, add a new String Value called Location. Set the value of ‘Location’ to where you extracted the dll and xml files (ie, D:\wsg0.1)
5. Install the DLL into the Global Assembly Cache – drag and drop it into C:\Windows\Assembly or from commandline, gacutil -I wgs.addin.dll
6. Run Windows Live Messenger, Options, Add-ins, Find the DLL, Click ‘Settings’, Detect Games. Close that settings window
7. Use the drop down where you set your ’status’, and you should see a “Turn on ‘WGS’”. Select that.
8. Play game

Supported Games

So far I’m only ’supporting’ games I’ve got installed – mainly ’cause they’re the only ones I can test.

• World of Warcraft
• Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
• Neverwinter Nights 2
• Lord of The Rings Online
• Hellgate: London (Beta)
• Starcraft
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Battlefield 2142
• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

If you want to add more games support, edit gamesdatabase.xml (and then run detect games again) or detectedgames.xml. Feel free to add the details of other games in the comments

In vNext (or I should say, features I’ll try and add over many versions) my plans are

• Simplify installation process
• Add some exception handling
• Use DDE instead of setting messenger.AddInProperties.PersonalStatusMessage. Should be a lot more friendly, and use the ‘WLM’ game icon
• XFire_Games.ini file converter
• Manual Adding/editing of games
• More “secure” detection. Currently just looks for process name, doesn’t care about where it comes from.
• DirectX Overlays to enable in game chat. Need to sign a third party DLL to do that first, eek.

Disclaimer

While it shouldn’t damage anything, if it does, its not my fault. It should be used ‘as-is’, and at your own risk.

Painful coding

Do you know its really hard to code anything while you are in pain?
A lot of ‘geeks’ suffer from RSI at some stage, others just deal with debugging mutlithreaded programs. Me? I deal with Chronic Headaches. All day, every day.

At the moment I’m trying to setup a debugging enviroment so I can step through a different POP Library to see how I can access the message body effectivly.
It isn’t a hard task by any means, but with headaches, everything is ‘blocked’. It’s like UAC – only the way Apple describe it in the ‘I’m a PC and I’m a Mac‘ ads.

For example, I know I need to:

• go to my Start Menu
• fire up Visual Studio Orcas
• make a New Project
• Add the DLL’s for the POP Library
• Add the bits of code I need for the actual POP connection

But when I actually go to do that, this is what happens:

• Go to the Start Menu
• Remember I need to fire up an application…but…what application was it?
• Oh, thats right, VS, thats fired up now…great, cannot for the life of me find the New Project button…I mean, I’m looking at File -> New, but there’….oh, there it is.
• Project type? Crap, I know this one, why isn’t it jumping out at me…WPF App, that’ll do.
• DLL’s….dammit, I know I downloaded them somewhere…

and so on and so forth.

Thats all before I get to the actual applicationg programming part, where I have to think about algorithms and whatnot. That’s becoming increasingly difficult to do as I live with headaches. Maybe I should give up programming and go into media, since people have been calling me a ‘graphics artist’ lately anyway…

Sigh, this bites, I’m going to lay down.

Moving from PHP to ASP.NET

PHP

PHP is for many people (when it comes to ‘web languages’) their bread and butter, for others its what they started it before moving on to bigger and better things.
This is a combination of cost, ease of learning/use, and availability of the platform.

PHP wasn’t the first web language for me (funnily enough, “Classic” ASP was, but thats only because thats what my free webhost offered at the time), but I’ve spent a substantial amount of time working with it. I’ve created blogs, forums, as well as a myriad of other ’scripts’.

My choice of “LAMP” (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) as my platform has been pretty simple: cost and availability of material.
Finding a webhost that offers decent amounts of storage and bandwidth for a small price (unemployed disabled student here…) is really easy. Finding the learning material for PHP is even easier, as not only does any search enginge turn up huge amounts of results for free PHP tutorials, but it was what 90% of my friends were using at the time. However, while developing a reasonably large site by myself (ANZGW), I began developing my general programming skills (such as realising when OOP would really come in handy) and at the same time, I began to notice some of the downfalls of PHP.

1. OOP in PHP sucks. PHP5 improved things (both what was available such as method/attribute visibility and performance) in OOP substantially, but unfortunately, it still sucks. The biggest problem with OOP in PHP, to me, is the lack of method overloading (yes, I’m aware of the ways to can achieve it, but its messy).
2. Despite all the hardwork that was done with PHP5, there was one massive flaw in PHP they failed to address: incosisitent naming of functions. I understand the reason they kept everything named the way it was (compatibility), but its a nightmare to try and remember all of any languages inbuilt functions when there isn’t a common naming convention.
   What do I mean? Well, say you want find the position of a character in a string, you use strpos(). That part is easy to remember, string is str, position is pos. strpos()!
   What if you then want to replace part of a string? Going by the previous logic, it’d have to be strreplace(), right? Wrong. Its str_replace()
3. There isn’t a decent IDE out there for PHP. AptanaIDE, NuSoft’s PHPEd, Zend Studio, etc all suck. Most of the time they’re slow to launch, have a poor interface, run slowly (since they’re mostly multi-platform, they’re written in Java,which means they loooove their horrible GTK-esque themes on Windows).
   If you’ve ever used one of these products, and the ‘Intellisense’ wasn’t horribly slow, I’d say you’re lucky. For me, they’d usually take several seconds to popup, which in that time, I can type the entirety of the function myself.
   It got to the point that all I could use was Notepad++ which only has syntax highlighting, but is fast and more stable than the others.
4. No Namespaces
5. Caching/compiling/whatever you want to call it isn’t the default.

ASP.NET

It just so happened that my next project I was playing with was going to be a desktop application, .NET sounded a lot better than learning C++, so I went with C# as I like its general syntax more than VB.NET.
The first thing that hit me when playing with .NET was the IDE. In a word, wow. Easy to use, incredibly fast Intellisense…just wow.
The next thing as I started to get a bit further into my program was that it was a proper programming language, compared to the ‘work in progress’ which is PHP.

In the last week or two I’ve started to move into ASP.NET (only 2.0, not 3.0 for now ;)). WebControls – especially databound WebControls – are just so amazingly simple to implement (at least basic implementation) yet so effective. The default is a two-tier application (aspx and its code behind file)…I think I’m in love!
I can programmatically access controls? Wow.
Master pages in addition to themes mean I don’t have to implement my own theming engine (for now, at least. I’ve heard reports that Master Pages don’t go far enough), or more importantly and unlike PHP, I don’t have to implement somebody elses and learn their weird template tags.
I think the two controls I’ve just thought ‘cool’ to so far are the Wizard and GridView controls.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a few things in ASP.NET which don’t seem…right.

• MasterPages can’t set the theme. I felt that was incredibly dumb that it has to be set per page, but just creating a class and making every page inherit that was enough to solve that problem.
• ASP.NET AJAX in Orcas has been declared a core component, but I still have to add the handlers to the web.config manually. I don’t understand why Orcas can’t automatically add that in when I drag down a ScriptManager object.
  IIS7 also requires changing the application pool of the website to “Classic.NET Application Pool”.
  Without those two things, you get “Sys is not declared” in your browser.

PHP vs ASP.NET

One of the most interesting things in the “PHP vs ASP.NET” debate (religious war almost…) is the learning curve.
If you’re looking at ASP.NET or PHP to learn, and you have some programming background (preferably with C/C++ style syntax), you’ll see PHP and after a few minutes you’ll know how to output a variable, or do a myriad of other things. PHP starts off very ‘easy’, and you feel ‘in power’, partially because there is but a single PHP file.

ASP.NET on the other hand, looks incredibly daunting, as you don’t just have to figure out C#/VB.NET, you have to figure out these ‘WebControl’ thingies, as well as where you can actually put your code, how it interacts with the presentation layer, etc.

However, after that initial hurdle, there is a lot less of the ‘hack/script’ approach there is in PHP when you get to the more advanced concepts like OOP, because .NET is built to be an OOP environment.

Apart from the learning curves, I think the next big problem people have when deciding PHP or ASP.NET is the cost.
PHP is inheritable notepad (or basic text editor is what I’m getting at) based. ASP.NET, because of its complexities from the begining of its cycle, thrives in a proper IDE – thats why Visual Studio exists. Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2005 can cost a lot, depending on what version you get.
However, there is a very feasible solution to this: the Express versions of Visual Studio are free.
For some reason (PHP Fanboy cloud?) I just wasn’t aware of them, but they do exist, and aren’t horribly crippled or out of date.
There are also other IDE’s, such as SharpDevelop, but I personally like Visual Studio, so I’ll stick with that.

Apart from IDE costs (or lack thereof), ASP.NET really requires IIS/Windows Server. If you do a quick comparison, Windows Servers are much more expensive for what you get (I’m talking about the shared webhost environments, which is all I can afford/need at this stage).
My .NET hosting is with NetLogistics, who also happen to have Linux hosting. On their most basic plans for each (which both cost AUD$19.95/month), you get the same bandwidth/disk storage, but on the Linux plans you get more domains available to you.
Not a big deal, but if you look at other hosts (US in particular), Linux shared hosting can net you gigabytes more storage/bandwidth for the same price of any .NET host.

The solution isn’t as clear cut as the IDE issue. Yes, Mono exists (gives .NET to Linux), but it does have some limited features, and the uptake of Mono is disappointing to say the least.
While the differences are minimal (the libraries you include), you can’t develop for both Mono AND “Microsoft” .NET. Although I doubt it will ever happen, perhaps mod_dotnet needs to be created by Microsoft, but from a business point of view, that cannot be incredibly attractive.

Conclusion

Overall, I think there is probably a place for both PHP and ASP.NET.
ASP.NET seems to be a bit of overkill for smaller sized projects (or for things that simply don’t need OOP). That doesn’t mean PHP can’t be used on large projects – there are many frameworks which improve its maintainability when it scales, its just…it probably will never scale as well as ASP.NET.
I’ll probably develop in both. ASP.NET while I can (although, I’m still very much in the learning process, so I may discover something I don’t like), and PHP when its the only option because of time/money/server resources/etc.

If you intend to learn ASP.NET, check out Programming in ASP.NET Third Edition, its a fairly straight forward book which while it assumes you have a decent C# knowledge, doesn’t actually require you to be a .NET expert.

ReMIX07

Why it’s time to rethink & ReMix

On the frontiers of the Web, the boundaries are blurring: between developers and designers; between advertisers and publishers; between software and services; between media and technology; between TVs and PCs; between producers and consumers. The old order is getting a little mixed up.

ReMix is Microsoft’s conference for cutting-edge web professionals designing and building next-generation experiences through Silverlight.

With capabilities never experienced before, Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web while bridging communication gap between designers and developers.

(from http://www.microsoft.com/australia/remix07/about.aspx)

Held at Crown Palladium Promanade, ReMIX07:AU was an interesting event, Will and I tagged along to various things together.

Day 1

• “Registration and refreshments”
  8:00 am – 9:00 am

  Wow. Early morning. Sucked. Will and I went to the wrong place thanks to me, but we got there eventually.
  There was food, I think, but nothing that stood out too much

• Keynote Address
  9:00 am – 10:30 am

  Finula Crowe – product manager for Microsoft Australia, and a lovely lady in general (we spoke to her at WebJam) – opened the keynote, then handed over to Brian Goldfarb – Group Product Manager in Redmond (I think?).
  It was amusing to see that despite Finula having a very thick Irish accent, the crowd responded to her as if she was ‘one of us’, but as soon as the American Brian stepped on, people tuned out a little.

  Brian talked about how Microsoft provide a platform rather than just a product. That is, .NET.
  Then on to how the platform has to change to keep up with users changes. No longer is all your ‘computing’ done on a computer, but its also done on an Xbox360 (through XNA), on a mobile phone (.NET Mobile Edition), and through the web browser (ASP.NET and now, Silverlight).
  Overall, I found Brian to be a bit boring – Will agreed, but probably because it was the exact same speech/slides as what he presented at MIX. Maybe its how American’s generally talk slower than us aussies, but he just seemed to be slow moving throughout his presentation.

  Shane Morris who followed with demo’s of the Expression products quickly.

  Lucas Sherwood from Lightmaker followed showing off some of Lightmakers endevours with Silverlight (and I think WPF). This was probably the most interesting part of the keynote for me. It was fantastic to see what is actually achievable with Silverlight/WPF, rather than “oh, its so awesome, you can do so much, let me show you my hello world/flickr carosel”.

  I’m fairly certain somebody from @WWW presented something, I just can’t remember who/what. I think it was the National Geographic video website powered by Silverlight which had a guy drinking from elephant dung.

• Lee Brimlow
  Rapid Fire Design & Prototyping in WPF
  10:45 am – 11:45 am

  Lee showed off his adventures in WPF, starting with his very first attempts just by using Expression Blend as if it was Flash. This included some three dimensional stuff, animation, video, the ‘must have’ Flickr example, etc.
  Then he moved onto the examples where he played with XAML/proper classes, some physics, speech API, lists.

  Overall, while his presentation was done well, it was a bit boring and slow moving. It would have been nice if he had of showed how he achieved some of the cooler things in Blend (Yahoo WPF client anybody?).
  For me, there was nothing new in this presentation – I’ve played with WPF, both with XAML and through Expression Blend..

  The complaints about ‘AllowTransparency’ that Lee had, I’ve already blogged about.
  I was a bit disappointed and disheartened by this first presentation, as it wasn’t what I was expecting from Lee (since I read his WPF Blog). I don’t really think it was Lee’s fault so much as I think the hour long sessions weren’t enough to properly cover the content. An hour and a half to two hours would have made most of the sessions ‘better’.

• Morning Tea
  11:45 am – 12:00 pm

  I can’t really remember much about what food was there, apart from Morning Tea on Day Two. That is to say, most of it was fairly ‘blah’, and in small quantites.
  For essentially a geek conference (thanks Blaman…), the food was lacking.

• Laurence Moroney
  Rich Web Applications with Silverlight, XAML and Javascript
  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

  Unlike the first session I attended, this was a more ‘developer’-centric presentation.
  Unfortunately (for me), Laurence covered Silverlight 1.0, not 1.1 (which is the cool .NET version, rather than Javascript. This is the reason there isn’t many notes, plus, anybody reading things blog as probably already figured out what Silverlight is from MIX).
  In a nutshell, Silverlight is cool because its ‘object oreintated’-ish; it handles enough media – WMV7/8/9, VC1 (think HD), WMA and MP3; said media is handled very nicely behind the scenes with buffering/downloading as well as bandwidth optimisation (so it won’t buffer too much unless the user really needs it) and most values are normalised for working with them nicely.

• Lunch
  1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

  The food served was the same served both days, and the same served at the Cisco Technology Day which was in Crown Palladium. Sadly, it was much better at the free Cisco Tech Day – more food (~4 tables rather than two), and the nachos were warmer and less soggy.

• Lucas Sherwood
  Switching to WPF and Silverlight
  2:00 pm- 3:00 pm

  Continuing on from his quick demo in the keynote, Lucas showed off two applications – one WPF, one Silverlight – and talked about his company’s (Lightmaker) experience – that is, being thrown in the deepend on several fronts.

  The programs he showed were really nice ‘looking’, unfortunately the WPF one (The Olympic Social Network) failed to get past the login screen.
  The Silverlight application Lightmaker developed for Orlando Magic was really neat looking. So neat that I’ve started playing with Silverlight 1.1 myself, and a demo of that should be up within the next couple of weeks (I’ve got a dozen blog posts to get through first…)

  Lucas stated a few times how he’s a developer not a presenter, and yes, he occasionally did exactly what I do when I present is shuffle back and forward and talk fast, but I have to admit, he had one of the best presentations (minus the grand exceptions) of the conference.

• Steve Marx
  Vista Sidebar Gadgets
  3:15 pm- 4:15 pm

  This was in the smallest room, so the presentation had a much ‘closer/personal’ feel to it.

  Surprisingly, Steve was the first to use Internet Explorer. Not the only one, but the majority of presenters used Firefox, which was interesting.

  I’ve looked at Sidebar gadgets a little, so there wasn’t anything hugely surprising for me.
  Sidebar gadgets are HTML/Javascript. They have certain restrictions on them – sizewise as well as capabilities. They’re really insecure (no way to encrypt sensitive data). They can host Silverlight data, as well as making AJAX calls.

  Its good to see that there are some ‘forward thinking’ parts to Sidebar gagdets. For example, in the Gadget.XML, <permissions> tag current does nothing (its set to ‘full‘), but they are hoping to add more security into it later, as well as potentially expanding it (speculation, but maybe an iGoogle-esque webportal where you can drag gadgets from your sidebar to your portal – and visaversa).

• Afternoon Tea
  4:15 pm – 4:30 pm
• Phil Beadle and Dave Glover
  Orcas for Web Developers
  4:30 pm – 5:30 pm

  Phil and Dave had an interesting session on some of the new web developer based tools available in Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas), particularly looking at XHTML/CSS tools, as well as Javascript Intellisense/etc. These features made Expression Web seem a bit pointless – look down to the Expression Web session coverage to see what I mean.

  Overall, good presentation, those two looked like they had a lot of fun.

• WebJam & Galactic Circus festivities
  5:30 pm – 10:00 pm

  I thought WebJam was crap to be honest. I wasn’t in the actual tiny room they were presenting in, so all I had was 3x massive TV’s and horrendous audio feeds to go by.
  Apparently they had no net connection there, and since its WebJam, that kind of messed things up a little.
  Sat down and mostly talked to other ReMIX attendee’s, which was good…the people of ReMIX (attendees, presenters, and general staff) really made the experience great. Nothing like seeing Frank run like crazy ;)

Day 2

Unfortunately, I was so wrecked after day one (I didn’t get home till 11pm or so!), I didn’t bother bringing mums laptop with me on day two, so I didn’t write that many notes/can’t remember too much of it.

Day two, however, saw me bring along my Foam Blue Monster.

Nick Hodge snapped that photo while Will and I were playing Gears of War on the Xbox 360’s setup. Just for the record, I won most of the games ;)
I’ll get some better photos of the Blue Monster when I get home.

• Keynote
  I rocked up half an hour late because I slept in till 7am. 10 minutes before my train was supposed to leave.
  The crowd seemed mostly asleep when I arrived anyway.
• Joseph Cooney
  WPF Fundamentals: Developing Rich Interactive Applications

• Michael Kordahi
  Designing with Microsoft Expression Web: Today and Tomorrow.

  I attended this mostly because the other two sessions running at the same time didn’t really appeal to me, and that we were to receive a free copy of Expression Web (xWeb)For what its worth, Michael did a fantastic job of promoting and trying to sell the product. The truth is though, I don’t think anybody was impressed enough to want to go out and buy this, or switch from whatever they were previously using.It would be fair to say this is a direct competitor to Adobe’s Dreamweaver and while its a huge step up from Frontpage, xWeb still seems to be a long way behind.

  A few of the very bad points are:

  • xWeb doesn’t support any other server side languages other than ASP.NET in v1 (v2 is meant to add PHP).
  • xWeb doesn’t have Intellisense for ASP.NET (C#/VB.NET etc), so you’re extremely unlikely to want to do any ‘backend’ code in it.
  • Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) has most of its big selling features like HTML/Javascript Syntax highlighting/Intellisense. And if you remember Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) Expression Web Edition (try saying that a few times…) is free, and xWeb is “worth” $550AUD…well..
  • The Expression range is trying to be both for designers and developers. If thats the case, why does xWeb have the worst interface out of the suite? All of the other Expression products have a unified black ‘I’m-dark-and-sexy-therefore-I’m-a-designer-tool’ appearance to them, but xWeb is stuck in Office 2003 mode.
  • Doesn’t support any versioning/source control
  • Won’t open VSProj files like Expression Blend does

  It did have some good points, like being able to drag-and-drop CSS, as well as the decent WYSIWYG code generation, but nothing that was a really big selling point for somebody who can figure out XHTML/CSS, which aren’t exactly the hardest things to learn.
  xWeb WYSIWYG editor won’t make it easier to create fantastic/unusual XHTML/CSS appearances, nor does its code view have anything that things like Notepad++ doesn’t have.
  If anything, if you’re a WYSIWYG person, its fantastic. It generates standards compliant code. Thats about it though.

  The other thing to note was Michael is a funny guy, and had a fantastic presentation (Standards compliant code gets the chickz!). Its just a pity his subject sucked so very much.

• Panel: Web 2.0
  On the panel was Cameron Reilly of Podcast Network, Ben Barren from Gnoos, Richard MacManus from ReadWriteWeb, and Michael Kordahi with Brad Howarth of lagrange communications moderating.
  I didn’t write notes for this panel – for the audience it was intended for most of the information and discussion would have already been done to death. “Web2.0 is not just a technology, its an idea”, “Australia lags behind”, “Corporations lag behind”, etc.

  Cameron Reilly was very distracting – he was very overconfident to the point where he seemed arrogant. I won’t call him arrogant as thats unfair, I haven’t met him or talked with him personally, but when he blamed the lack of “Web 2.0″ development in Australia on the ‘audience’ because we weren’t willing to take the risk of mortgaging our houses, quitting jobs, etc to fund startups…well…he seemed a bit arrogant. Plus, the glasses that he wore really made him look ‘Bono-esque’.

• Steve Marx
  Go Deep With AJAX.

  Will fell asleep during this one. Steve’s presentations aren’t too bad, but he has a bit of a monotonous voice, it was late in the conference, and the stuff he covered was pretty boring.
  “What is AJAX?”, followed by Microsoft’s implementation of that through ASP.NET. Yeah, I learnt a little about what controls were available in ASP.NET AJAX, but thats only because I haven’t played with ASP.NET yet.

• Closing Panel: Designers are from Venus, Developers are from Mars

  This panel was made up of Lee Brimlow, Gerry Gaffney of Information and Design, Philip Beadle of Readify (Phil is a hilarious guy. He loved his Javascript work, as well as colouring things red – a true developer), Adam Kowaltzke of Avanade and Shane Morris as Moderator.
  This panel was ‘funnier’, but by this time we were all mostly asleep (just because ReMIX was drawing to a close, not because they were boring.)

  The panel talked about ‘designers vs developers’ and ‘designers + developers’, both how it has been in the industry, and how it is changing, as well as roles that are popping up so it becomes ‘designers + devingers vs devingers + developers’ – an intermediate role which can do both, and is able to translate for both sides.
  I’d like to consider myself a devigner, but I’m not so sure if anybody else would ;)

  I’m sure this was a better panel than what I’m able to blog about it, but as stated, we were all tired by here and just wanted to get home.

Overall…

ReMIX07 was a lot of fun. All of the presenters seemed to be very passionate about what they did/presented, which is a good start.
The presentations were of pretty good quality/design, although it wasn’t hard to tell the difference between ‘designers’ (or ‘devigners’ I guess) and ‘developers’ presenting.

Next year, it really needs free WiFi setup, as well as more powerpoints to recharge laptops. Those with laptops want to be able to fire up their computer, get to a Microsoft portal where we can download the slides (and maybe even the examples) so that we can compile whatever is on the big screen on our own computers – just so we can see it really work.

It wouldn’t hurt if they had fewer sessions that went for longer so they could cover the content a bit better.

I wouldn’t complain about better ‘free software’. MIX in Vegas got Expression Studio (and a ‘unique’ cover for each attendee no less) and Vista Ultimate (and random other goodies like a pen and memory stick). By comparison we got Expression Web, which is fairly hit-and-miss product.
I’m not trying to suggest that the only reason I went to ReMIX was for the free stuff, but its hard to get excited about Expression Web when the major session on it made it seem pathetic (which backed up my thoughts on my previous trial of Expression Web). If they had of given us Expression Blend, on the other hand, I would have been ecstatic as its a fantastic product.

Nick Hodge has a good round up of many ReMIX blog posts for those who are interested.

My apologies for posting this a week late, I’ve been a tad busy (more blog posts to follow, at around one per day or three). I also took a whole stack of photos, but not many of them turned out too well, so I’ve skipped them.

ResizeMode="CanResizeWithGrip" sucks

One of the great things about WPF is how you’re able to create great looking apps.
One of the sucky things about WPF is how you’re able to create great looking apps suck within the standard WinXP/Vista borders.

It’s not hard to turn off the borders, a simple WindowStyle=”none” in the Window tag in XAML does the job.
The problem is, you then can’t move or resize your window.

Okay, AeothLib takes care of the former, and I was trying to add the latter to AeothLib, when I came across ‘ResizeMode=”CanResizeWithGrip”‘

‘Fantastic‘, I thought, ‘this is exactly what I want’. That was until I discovered how poor performance it is when ‘AllowsTransparency=”True”‘ is set.
Allowing transparency’s is one of the main reasons you’d use no window style in the first place!

After exams/ReMix/engagement party, I’ll actually add it into AeothLib.

(note, trying out Windows Live Writer Beta 2, as I was in my last post, so apologies for anything that’s extremely screwed up. Too many P’s…. Yay! Scape goats!)

YA RLY

I don’t know how to describe this..

[code]
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
GIMMEH VAR
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10 O RLY?
YA RLY
BTW this is true
VISIBLE "BIG NUMBER!"
NO WAI
BTW this is false
VISIBLE "LITTLE NUMBER!"
KTHX
KTHXBYE
[/code]

I’ll try with a picture…

Nope, that didn’t explain it.
The above code is ‘LOLCAT‘ – a new programming language – which is part hilarious, possibly part predicting our future.
I might have a play with it if it works with Apache ;)

Moving WPF Windows without a titlebar

Desktop applications, more often than not, are ugly. Thats where WPF steps in.
You can set wonderful transparencies, colours, irregular shapes, etc, but there is just one problem. Ugly borders.

What do I mean? I mean the border the OS puts on all Windows, be it Vista or XP.

Its easy enough to turn off, in XAML you just set WindowStyle=”None” to your Window tag. The next problem arises in that you now can’t move your window at all.

This small class (download below) will let you change your Window Style to None, yet still move the window (by grabbing any part of the window).
[csharp]
public class MoveWindow
{
public const int WM_NCLBUTTONDOWN = 0xA1;
public const int HT_CAPTION = 0×2;

[DllImportAttribute("user32.dll")]
public static extern int SendMessage(IntPtr hWnd,
int Msg, int wParam, int lParam);
[DllImportAttribute("user32.dll")]
public static extern bool ReleaseCapture();

private Window target;
public MoveWindow(Window target)
{
this.target = target;
target.MouseMove += MouseMove;
}
private void MouseMove(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
{
if (e.LeftButton == MouseButtonState.Pressed)
{
ReleaseCapture();
IntPtr hwnd = new WindowInteropHelper(target).Handle;
SendMessage(hwnd, WM_NCLBUTTONDOWN, HT_CAPTION, 0);
}
}
}
[/csharp]

The usage is pretty darn easy:
[csharp]
new Aeoth.MoveWindow(this);
[/csharp]

I’ve decided to bundle a few of my ‘helper’ classes into one project, so they’re all available in one download. I’ll up up a project page for it later.
Download!

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.

Breaking Expression Blend 2 May Preview

I’ve been playing with WPF lately, using Visual Studio and Expression Blend.
For the most part, I’ve really enjoyed learning WPF and C#, both extremely powerful and flexible. This is my first time working with .NET outside of Visual Basic.NET and a Uni assignments (you know, the fantastic ones where they decide to teach you the language, but you aren’t allowed to use advanced things like arrays or collections to solve problems)

My copy of Expression Blend was one of the older beta’s, and I had noticed Blend 2 May Preview was out, so I thought I’d try that.

The only thing I’ve noticed so far is that it includes Silverlight support….oh, and it wasn’t able to display/render my WPF program!

I was greeted with this fantastic look whenever I try and open any of my XAML files:

Crap crap said the Aeoth…

The full error was “Exception: could not load type ‘DebuggingModes’ from assembly ‘mscorlib, Version=2.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561935e089’ due to value type mismatch“.
The program still compiles fine, but I can’t edit it using Blend at all!

If I had of been learning XAML, I’m sure this would have been fine, but I’ve been learning to use Blend, so I can’t really do anything productively in raw XAML.

Now, when I started writing this post, the mind was going something like “crap crap crap crap, have I lost all my UI work?“.

The only thing that looked a bit weird was a reference (only viewable in Blend, and I didn’t get a screenshot of it) “Microsoft.NET.2.Framework”, or something along those lines.
A little weird, and something I hadn’t added in myself, so I decided to remove it from the project. It didnt’ fix any problems…until I restarted Blend…and I was happily greeted with:

No peeking yet!