AddressOf.com : Silverlight

End of year wrap up (2011)

CorySmith — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 04:36:00 GMT

BLOG

I'm currently in the planning stages to rebuild this site. I've delayed doing this for a long time since I didn't want to "break links"; however, one reason why I don't contribute as much as I used to is the fact that I enjoy the comment interaction. Thanks to blog spam, I had to disable anonymous comments and, since that time, my posts have slowed way down. (Yes, CAPTCHA controls exist; however, it's not that straight forward to implement on this now aging copy of community server.) So, I've made the decision that it is time to do whatever is necessary to kick start things back into full gear and if this means that web links are broken in the process... so be it. I'll investigate ways to accommodate the change; however, at the end, it's time to get'r'done.

Movie Jukebox

For those following along (for a while), I have another pet project that I built for my own purposes and have enjoyed the fruits of since that time. I have four 400 disc DVD players connected to Media Center that allow me to choose among 1600 movies at the press of a button; and the overall cost of the hardware is amazingly small in comparison to other options. I was recently approached by a long time friend regarding his desire to attempt to market the project and we made our first sale last week! It's officially a product now!!!! For full disclosure, I did have to address a few issues that I was ignoring (I knew what I was doing after all) and made a few enhancements to actually productize it for a v1.0 release.

Fort Worth .NET Users Group

I've been knee deep in working to get the FWDNUG on track now that I'm the acting president. Let's just say that it's been an adventure up to this point; however, I think things are starting to really come together and 2012 is starting to look like a very good year for the members of the group!

I also want to say how much fun the end-of-year party was; how often can one say that thanks to a .NET users group I got to shoot an AR-15, an AK-47 and a Colt .45! :-D

VB6 -> VB10 Comparison

Look for additional entries on this to come in the first part of January. Additionally, once VB11 is made available, I'll be sure to do a follow up for any items that are appropriate.

BASIC

The pet project is still moving nicely along.

Parser/Interpreter

I think I've pretty much gotten the parsing and interpreter where I'd like to see it; at least for this project. The performance is pretty good and works pretty well on Windows Phone 7.

Portable Library

My decision to switch to the portable library project was, as far as I'm concerned, a very good one. It does force me to have to think through how I'm going to implement portions of the project so that implementation can be segmented across different platforms, which at times can be a bit daunting in the midst of "just getting it done". However, even with the additional work that is involved, I do believe that the results are paying off.

Display

The "IDE" portions is pretty much 100% as well as most of the ANSI style "graphics". Additionally, CGA mode is mostly complete (except for my new arch enemy... CIRCLE). As a follow up to the last post, the "last line issue" has been resolved by no longer trying to reproduce the behavior of the original GW-BASIC... which is something that seems to be impossible because two different versions of GW-BASIC did it two different ways... so I decided to "fix the bug" and move on.

Keyboard

Working pretty well; however, I think I'm going to re-address this at a later time so that it is based on "scan codes" at a lower level and works across the various keyword appropriately.

File System

The file system over web services idea is working pretty well; however, there are significant issues that I've encountered due to a budget host environment. Since my last post, I am now interested in attempting to build this over SkyDrive... so we'll see where this goes as we move into the new year.

Sound

Silverlight 5 has been released, so now I can see if the improvements to low-level sound will help solve some of the issues I was facing. I'll update once I know more.

Keywords

As of this writing, 176 keywords have been implemented. For the most part, the majority of these keywords is pretty complete.

Compatibility

All of the code that I've attempted to execute from the BASIC Computer Games - Microcomputer Edition book (c. 1979) works great. I've been playing Hunt the Wumpus; that sure brings back a few memories. ;-)

One of my original stated goals was to get this to the point where the original, unmodified, DONKEY.BAS code would execute as close to the original as possible. As of this writing, the game can execute with only one minor modification to the original code; the culprit at this point is the SOUND statement, of which I've already mentioned I'm having to get a bit creative to solve. The issue is not whether or not it can play sound; the SOUND statement was used as a means to throttle the game loop, which means I need to get my sound statement working the same. In a world (Silverlight) where everything seems to want to be async, it's proves to be a little bit of a problem but I think I've got a solution worked out. Once done, the goal is to get all the original .BAS files included with DOS version 1.1 working.

Another interesting tidbit is that modifications had to be made to accommodate the actual sample code instead of relying 100% on the official documentation which neglects to mention a few quirks that I knew all those years ago but have since forgotten; such as the "optional" end quotation on string literals. If it's in the documentation, I couldn't find it by scanning over it.

Summary

I'm still having a blast working on this project and can't wait to see where it will lead. It's so much more fun now that it's to the the point where the original code comes to life.

Conclusion

Be sure, I have a few other tidbits that I'm working on and a ton of ideas that I'm working through with regards to this site; so stay tuned. Let's just say if 2012 is the year the world comes to an end... I've got a lot of stuff on my plate that I want to accomplish before hand. ;-) In all seriousness, I look forward to 2012 and hope that everyone enjoys success and prosperity in the new year.

Action Movie Night - Wednesday, November 17th

CorySmith — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 13:50:00 GMT

Action Movie Night returns!

This is just a quick reminder regarding the Action Movie Night taking place Wednesday evening, November 17th, 2010, starting at 7:30pm located at my house so space is limited to those that RSVP. The movie being shown is:

IMDB, Preview

Earlier this year, during our honeymoon, we visited San Francisco. Of course, while in San Francisco, we had to visit China Town and found a little shop selling import movies. I bought over a dozen of them at a really (*really*) good price. I've been so busy, haven't had a chance to watch but two or three since then. So, to kick off the return of Action Movie Night, we will be pulling from that stack of movies. To ease into it, I found one in the stack that isn't sub-titled... so we'll start with it. ;-)

In addition to the movies, I’ll also be firing up the grill for a grillin’ session (weather permitting). This will start around 6:00pm and everyone is invited to bring their own slab of meat and try their hand. (BGYO - Bring and Grill Your Own) Some side dishes will be prepared to go along with your charred masterpieces. (If weather is not permitting, feel free to grab something on the way; no one will be offended.)

We will also be making time to dive into Kinect! So come prepared.

Feel free to bring your significant other, just keep in mind that if you do, I would hope that they are there to enjoy the movies first and foremost and won't be offended (at least not outspoken wise ;-) ). It is still an 18 or older gathering though.

For future AMN's, please send me a comment regarding what movies you'd like to see... Remember, doesn't have to be newly released movies... just ones that fit the "Action" genre.

If you'd like to attend, please let me know (via comment to the left, email, Facebook, Twitter DM, Live Messenger or, if you have my number, give me a call) and I'll get you further details.

Additionally, if you are interested in seeing the new Windows Phone 7 (in this case the HTC HD7), you can take a look at it as well. Furthermore, if you are going to the Fort Worth .NET Users Group meeting on November 16th, Chris K. is presenting on developing for the Windows Phone 7 device. I believe he will also be demonstrating that VB can indeed be used to develop for this very exciting platform. I'll be there as well.

Wow! I can't believe I found this code...

CorySmith — Wed, 26 May 2010 23:09:00 GMT

Going through a bunch of old floppy disks and copying the files to my home server in an effort to get rid of these things, I happened across a bit of source code from WAAAAAAAAAY back. (March 7th, 1990 to be precise.)

For a few years around 1990, a friend of mine (Sean) and I ran a very successful BBS with tons of users and *AWESOME* interaction among them. This was during a time in BBS usage was at it's height and there were probably thousands to choose from. So Sean and I hatched a plan to put together our own online games and have these games be the driving force behind the entire community.

So what kind of games would we create? We were both into writing computer software and definitely considered ourselves computer enthusiasts. So the plan was to create a few games (in the days of BBS world, referred to as a "door") that would allow people to hack various systems. I had previous experience in such things and Sean had an amazingly creative imagination... we also decided to make it a challenge and build the doors in QuickBASIC 4.5 (as if creating games and learning the concept of interacting with BBS software via doors wasn't enough).

The first game to be released was pretty simple, allowing you to gain access to a computer terminal running something very similar to MS-DOS. You weren't sure what it was that you were looking for, you were just curious. If you could unlock the secrets within, you'd win a prize.

HAKR 'R US was born (later to be renamed to Janitors 'R Us in honor of the main character in the games and for reasons of unwanted advances by the "men in black" -- a story for another day).

Now that I've found this code, I'm hoping (most likely in vain) that I might be able to find part 1. What I found instead was part 2... which as anyone knows would be a much more ambitious undertaking. ;-)

So as I said, this code was written in QB4.5; of which there seems to be no way to execute it on Windows 7 64-bit (it's a 16-bit application). So I could possibly setup a VPC image with DOS, find a copy of QB4.5 and try to get it running that way. Nah... apparently I like challenges. ;-)

Fast forward to today and we now have Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and the version of BASIC is 14 revisions (Microsoft BASIC PDS 7.0/7.1, Microsoft Visual Basic 1-6, Microsoft Visual Basic for MS-DOS v1.00 and 5 releases on top of .NET) and 20+ years since this code was originally built. What was I to do? How about load it up in Visual Studio and see if I can get it to execute. About 20 minutes later of creatively solving problems, the code was executing! There were a few redraw problems with the key presses echoing twice to the screen (this was by design since we were emulating DOS through a terminal process which meant that you'd press a key and in order to see it on the screen, we'd have to send that string back to the client.) Wiped out the code causing this, the code that tracked prior usage and current progress for each user... the game was now playable.

Ah... the memories.

A few observations:

It's interesting to note that, for the most part, the BASIC language, at it's core, has been a strong language throughout all these years. The most basic constructs have managed to stand the test of time throughout all of these years. Most of the items that I had to change had to do with the "platform" (MS-DOS), specifically with how you interact with the console screen.
The code that I wrote 20 years ago is SCARY!!! ;-)
Even though the code was "sub-par" by today's standards, it did work; and it worked very well.
It's even more SCARY that it's been 20 years!!!

I think I'm going to translate the code to Silverlight and make it available for playing; this would require that I build some sort of emulated console display (which I think would be pretty straight forward). I may even do what I did in the past; offer a prize to those that can unlock the secrets within. So brush up on your MS-DOS skills. ;-)

Touring through Northwest Arkansas

CorySmith — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 10:43:00 GMT

I'll be leaving either tonight or tomorrow morning (really early) to start heading to Fort Smith, AR. Tuesday evening will be in Springdale, AR and finishing up Thursday evening in Harrison, AR.

If you are in the area of *all* three user group, consider attending all three since each group will host a different topic.

LINQ - An Average Joe's Guide (or "It's not all about SQL")
Fort Smith .NET User Group (Fort Smith, AR)
September 14th, 2009 - 6:00pm

ClickOnce - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Northwest Arkansas .NET User Group (Springdale, AR)
September 15th, 2009 - 5:30pm

Comparing WinForms to WPF
Ozark .NET User Group (Harrison, AR)
September 17th, 2009 - 6:00pm

As always, look forward to a heathly dose of conversation (not presentation).

It's looking like it will be raining all the way through Wednesday. :-( Bad for motorcycling, but might be good for you. If you are in the area and would like to get together, contact me and we'll see what we can do.

Fort Worth DNUX - 2/27/2008 @ 6:30pm

CorySmith — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:42:00 GMT

If you are in Fort Worth and interested in getting up to speed on WPF/Silverlight... XAML is one of the key components of doing so. Tonight's presentation is XAML 101 being presented by yours truly...

Hope to see ya there.

http://dnux.org for more information.

Yet another "user group" in Dallas/Fort Worth - Announcing "dnux"!

CorySmith — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:29:00 GMT

Announcing the Dallas/Fort Worth dnux group. What is it? .NET has been growing in size over the past 5+ years and, as such, it's hard to cover everything in a .NET user group meeting. Some people may call what dnux is as a "sig"; however, although there are similarities between dnux and a sig, the subjects covered will be broad enough that it doesn't really fit (in my opinion) the idea of a sig. Additionally, I'm purposefully trying to not use the words "user group" to describe dnux. It's an "enthusiasts group". I want to bring back the fire, the intensity, the energy and excitement in producing applications. I still haven't answered exactly what dnux is...

The name itself is taken from combining the the words .NET User eXperience; however, we may be discussing technologies that compliment .NET as well so the name itself doesn't really dictate the focus either. In the end, this group is all about the end user experience with a base focus on leveraging .NET as the core technology. So I see what your thinking, this will just be a group that is similar to other .NET user groups but with presentations focused on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), XAML, Media Center Markup Language (MCML), Silverlight, System.Drawing, Windows Forms, etc. You'd be right, and yet, you'd be wrong. dnux will focus on these technologies, sure; however, everything will be much more hands on and interactive. Almost organic in nature. The "presenter" will seed the conversations and the group as a whole will help dictate where that conversation goes. Some topics will be basic (especially in the beginning) as everyone is learning the technologies. As people become more proficient, things should get very interesting indeed. I don't want to spoil the surprises just yet, so if your interested in finding out more details, just come to the meetings. ;-)

You can find out more information at http://dnux.org.

Technology Avalanche

CorySmith — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 23:23:00 GMT

I have to admit that lately I've been feeling a little overwhelmed by the amount of new technology that I need to grok in order to stay ahead of the curve. In a relatively short window of time, we've had Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Expression Blend, XNA Studio and Windows Vista (with 7,000+ new API's) released and Silverlight, Dynamic Language Runtime, Core-CLR, yet another version of Blend, Windows Home Server and, probably most importantly, "Acropolis" coming within the next six to nine months. And this is just the items that I have on my personal todo list; the list is actually a pretty small in comparison to the total.

Obviously it isn't possible for me to learn all of this at the same exact time. So I've decided to focus on one of the core technologies behind several of the ones I've mentioned. XAML. Since XAML is the basis of WPF, Silverlight, Blend and "Acropolis"... it's something I'm not going to be able to avoid. Additionally, I'm focusing on the WPF angle.. but learning WPF via "Acropolis" and Blend. I have a long list of projects that I'd like to utilize WPF, so I'm starting there and seeing if I can rewrite one of the smaller ones utilizing "Acropolis".

What is "Acropolis"?

"Acropolis" is a "set of components and tools that make it easier for developers to build and manage modular, business focused, client .NET applications". "Acropolis" "builds on the rich capabilities of Microsoft Windows and the .NET Framework, including Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) by providing tools and pre-built components that help developers quickly assemble applications from loosely-coupled parts and services".

Ever heard of CAB? Ever tried CAB? If you have and thought, "Man, why does this sort of thing have to be so difficult.", "Acropolis" is poised to help rectify that situation. Brad Abrams used the word "democratize" to describe the goal of "Acropolis". As such, you won't have to understand what composite applications, software factories, etc. mean in order to build these sorts of applications. Using a wizard, you can create a basic infrastructure for a robust application that you can then focus on the business problems at hand instead of all of the plumbing to bring different "parts" together.

Since "Acropolis" is focused on delivering this technology leveraging XAML for both the plumbing and display (WPF), it seems like a great technology to focus on to get my feet wet with several pieces of technology. Also, I really believe that there will be a huge demand for those that understand "Acropolis" in the near future as more people realize the benefits of what a true rich client application can provide.

Additionally, I have decided to make it a personal mission (one of many it seems) to do whatever I can to see that VB is a true first class citizen in the "Acropolis" world. So it seems I have three reasons to spend some serious time in the land of "Acropolis".

Why Oh Why Microsoft Why Why Why

CorySmith — Fri, 25 May 2007 00:08:00 GMT

OK, this is ridiculous! Why wasn't this information funneled out to the VB MVP's (and other VB'ites like myself)? How is it that the first word of this is stated in public by none other than Miguel de Icaza (yes, the mono project guy)?

What am I talking about here? Well according to Miguel, he discovered that the Javascript compiler that is used by the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) that will be utilized initially in Silverlight 1.1 is written in VB. Yes, I said VB!

What better way to ensure that VB is "supported" in Silverlight than write a compiler that is included in Silverlight in VB. ;-)

In all fairness, I did find this out first from someone at Microsoft, but not until after Miguel posted it and then Paul (from Microsoft) pointed out Miguel's discovery. Again, this is something that should have been, at the very least, made public among VB Insiders. Sheesh.

Paul also points out that VBx (aka VB 10, the next version of VB to support dynamic language features) compiler is also written in VB. And yes, it will be included as part of Silverlight 1.1 as well.