Microsoft has just released a beta of their new Game Studio Express product.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/gse/
A very ambitious and pretty exciting move I think, opening up game development in a big way on both PC and Xbox360 (thats right you can make 360 games with this stuff)
Going to be interesting to see the sorts of things people do with the tech over time, and if other consoles now feel they have to match the home brew capabilities of the 360.
I have no previous experience in this style of programming, but it is something I have long intended to pursue, might be about time I think. Get my head out of the database.
31 August, 2006
28 August, 2006
Fun with ASP.NET
I have spent the last few days setting up an internal wiki for the office.
I started with a fairly simple and clean looking wiki I found on sourceforge called ProntoWiki
It is written in ASP.NET, C# and SQL Express 2005, so its a great little app to have a play with these new (for me atleast) technologies and get out of FoxPro for a moment.
Saturday was spent adding the ability to give pages a title that would show instead of the CamelCase key for the page, and writing a Flickr inspired control so we can just click the heading to edit it.
Now I need to go add a few more functions to the parsing routines, I just can't help but fiddle with new toys.
It is written in ASP.NET, C# and SQL Express 2005, so its a great little app to have a play with these new (for me atleast) technologies and get out of FoxPro for a moment.
Saturday was spent adding the ability to give pages a title that would show instead of the CamelCase key for the page, and writing a Flickr inspired control so we can just click the heading to edit it.
Now I need to go add a few more functions to the parsing routines, I just can't help but fiddle with new toys.
23 August, 2006
Textpad vs Everything Else
I have stated in public before my love of Textpad for developing HTML/CSS.
It is small, clean, fast and has served me well for a long time.
I have trialed some other tools, such as Dreamweaver and Visual Web Developer Express, but they have all lacked, in my limited explorations at least, one feature that would really make them useful to me.
I develop sites in patches, each page will have some common patches, such as a header and footer, some content specific to the page, and some patches that may be shared with other pages.
If you look at www.ht.com.au and the 9 "Feature Products" on the home page, there is a call in the website, which you pass a part number, and it runs off a HTML template, dropping in the details of that part. This gets called 9 times, on the homepage to generate the featured products, but is also used on other pages throughout the site, differences in display are handled by the CSS.
If I open this patch in a visual development tool, and try to preview it, it doesn't even come close, because by itself, the patch lacks the context of the rest of the page it is showing on.
For starters it is missing the CSS links, but even if it had these it is missing any container elements that may affect how the patch renders.
With the preview side of visual tools removed, it offers nothing more than intellisense. Which for me does not offset the overhead of a large application against a small.
Hence the reason I still use Textpad, even when developing a site the size of Harris Technology.
So what I believe visual development tools need, or if they already have this feature I need someone to point out where it is hiding, is the ability to apply some rendering context to a file you are working on. Along the lines of 'Attach these stylesheets' and 'Add this code before and this code after the file' but only when rendering, don't write it into the file on disk.
Has anyone else come across this sort of problem and found a way around it? Or do we all secretly still use Textpad.
It is small, clean, fast and has served me well for a long time.
I have trialed some other tools, such as Dreamweaver and Visual Web Developer Express, but they have all lacked, in my limited explorations at least, one feature that would really make them useful to me.
I develop sites in patches, each page will have some common patches, such as a header and footer, some content specific to the page, and some patches that may be shared with other pages.
If you look at www.ht.com.au and the 9 "Feature Products" on the home page, there is a call in the website, which you pass a part number, and it runs off a HTML template, dropping in the details of that part. This gets called 9 times, on the homepage to generate the featured products, but is also used on other pages throughout the site, differences in display are handled by the CSS.
If I open this patch in a visual development tool, and try to preview it, it doesn't even come close, because by itself, the patch lacks the context of the rest of the page it is showing on.
For starters it is missing the CSS links, but even if it had these it is missing any container elements that may affect how the patch renders.
With the preview side of visual tools removed, it offers nothing more than intellisense. Which for me does not offset the overhead of a large application against a small.
Hence the reason I still use Textpad, even when developing a site the size of Harris Technology.
So what I believe visual development tools need, or if they already have this feature I need someone to point out where it is hiding, is the ability to apply some rendering context to a file you are working on. Along the lines of 'Attach these stylesheets' and 'Add this code before and this code after the file' but only when rendering, don't write it into the file on disk.
Has anyone else come across this sort of problem and found a way around it? Or do we all secretly still use Textpad.
14 August, 2006
UTF-8 Encoding
I was recently working on creating RSS feeds dynamically from a product database, and kept finding they would not validate due to invalid characters being used for UTF-8 encoding.
I found a quick one liner that seems to tidy this up, albeit in a way i'm somewhat less than comfortable with (I never did exhaustive tests to be sure it didnt mess with the valid data in some way). Anyway here is my code
I found a quick one liner that seems to tidy this up, albeit in a way i'm somewhat less than comfortable with (I never did exhaustive tests to be sure it didnt mess with the valid data in some way). Anyway here is my code
cStr= strconv(strconv(m.cStr,11),9)
Has anyone done a similar thing before and have a better solution? Or better yet put my mind at ease that I have no reason to dislike this one.
07 August, 2006
All Quiet
So things have been a bit quiet on here the last few months.
I will hide behind the classic excuse of being very busy with the launch of a new website for one of our clients.
If you would like to check it out head over to www.ht.com.au.
The website is all fox (front-end and database) running on Web Connect 4.68
5.0 was released too far into the development of the site to spend the time upgrading before launch, it is something we will look at though.
There is scope for a number of articles in the development of this site, so keep an eye out for those as I get back into blogging.
I will hide behind the classic excuse of being very busy with the launch of a new website for one of our clients.
If you would like to check it out head over to www.ht.com.au.
The website is all fox (front-end and database) running on Web Connect 4.68
5.0 was released too far into the development of the site to spend the time upgrading before launch, it is something we will look at though.
There is scope for a number of articles in the development of this site, so keep an eye out for those as I get back into blogging.
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