A few weeks ago I started a Windows Phone 7 port of my old XNArkanoid.
It’s a C#-XNA remake of the classic Taito’s Arkanoid. This version is written in XNA 4.0 for Windows Phone. It’s not finished yet, but you can find all the information and source code at CodePlex:
If you work with C++/CLI projects, and recently jumped to Visual Studio 2010, you have probably noticed that Visual Studio re-targeted your project to .Net Framework 4. This is the default behavior when converting C++/CLI projects to VS2010, as some of its C++ compiler tools are only compatible with .Net Framework 4.
The problem is that sometimes you cannot jump to .Net 4 yet. Maybe because customer’s restrictions, maybe because compatibility problems with 3rd party tools, whatever… If that’s your case, you need to target to .Net Framework 3.0 or 3.5, and still want to use VS2010, you can do the following:
(Source: here and here and even better here)
On a C# project, you can select the target Framework by simply changing a value in a combo box. On a C++/CLI project, you will find this in the project properties page:
It´s just a read-only value, that you cannot change directly. To change it, you must edit the project´s file (.vcxproj). To do so, open it in the notepad, or better, use the new feature included in VS2010: Edit project file by right-clicking in the project and selecting the following menu entry:
You will end up with an xml view of the file. Search for a node called PropertyGroup. As a child node of this one, you should create another one with the form:
<TargetFrameworkVersion>v4.0</TargetFrameworkVersion>
It might already be there or not. If it’s not, create it. If it is, just edit its value, setting the target framework version you want: v3.0, v3.5, etc, ending with something like this:
After any change in project’s file, you will need to reload it, by closing and re-opening the solution, or by selecting “Reload Project” in the context menu of VS.
If you remember, we said that the VS2010 C++ compiler tools were not compatible with any Framework other than 4.0. That’s why as soon you change the target Framework and recompile, VS2010 will try to use the C++ compiler tools of Visual Studio 2008. If they are not present, it will stop the compilation with an error, requesting you to install VS2008.
Just a quick note: you need to install also the Service Pack 1 to VS2008.
In my case, and with my specific project, the Microsoft C++/CLI Optimizing Compiler crashed if I targeted the project to .Net Framework 3.5. I really didn’t investigate why, as I really wanted to target v3.0 and didn’t have much time. Targeting v3.0 worked just fine.
So if you find the same error and find the reason or a solution, please comment!
Cheers!
Since I moved to Visual Studio 2010, I have had several issues with Setup Projects. They convert from 2008 just fine, but I have detected some misbehaviors, specially related to DLL dependencies.
This morning, I came to a situation where Visual Studio always detected a DLL dependency which should not exist anymore. I tried marking the dependency as non-vital, excluding it. Nothing worked. My EXE file no longer depends on that DLL, but it was still there, and as it was an automatically detected dependency, I could not delete it. I tried even to set the DLL in the proper location (where Visual Studio was supposedly searching for it), but it didn’t work either. Visual Studio was still complaining about DLL not found.
The only thing that seemed to work momentarily was re-adding the EXE file that supposedly was dependant on that DLL. That fixed the DLL not found errors, but then appeared another one: “Unable to update the dependencies of the project”.
Searching a bit about this last message, I’ve found this post talking about garbage in project’s dependencies. Clayton James explains how to get rid of that error, cleaning the project by yourself in notepad. I found that information very useful.
However, in my specific case, it was not necessary to wipe all the Hierarchy and Files nodes (what wipes your solution too, making you to re-add all your files to your setup project). In my case it was enough with removing the references to the conflicting DLL from the Files section. That made the trick.
Hope it helps.
Taking the audio signal from your computer to your LCD/LED screen speakers is sometimes very easy, and sometimes quite tricky, depending on the model and builder of your graphics card. If you want to do so, there are several things you should be aware of:
First, you should know that nowadays this operation is possible both through HDMI and DVI ports, as today's graphics cards can take audio out from DVI ports too (using a DVI-HDMI cable or an adaptor).
Second, remember that you have two options to take audio from your computer to the LCD screen:
1.- Use external analog audio through a Jack-Jack or Jack-RCA cable (depending on the analog audio input of your screen)
2.- Use digital audio through the HDMI cable (available on every screen)
If you want to use the first option, you will need to configure your computer to use the Speakers as the default audio device. If you select the second option, you will want to set your Digital HDMI audio device as default.
Where to do so? In Start->Control Panel->Sound:
The good thing about second option is that it uses just one cable for both audio and video, but in Both options you will have to deal with other configuration issues to make them work with the TV Speakers:
TV Screens usually include several HDMI input ports, and they behave differently regarding audio input. The typical options are:
In those that make this decision automatically, when they decide one option or the other? If the computer is “telling” the TV that the HDMI cable has audio, the screen will take audio from there. If not, it will take audio from the external Jack/RCA.
So, if you want audio to go through an external analog jack-jack cable, HDMI should carry NO AUDIO (so the screens takes audio from the external cable).
Now, next step is: how to control when the computer sends audio through HDMI or not?
This task is to be managed by the graphics card, as it’s the graphics card who put signal on the HDMI cable. So, you will need to go to the nVidia Control Panel to adjust this option (under the Change Resolution tab). If the graphics card detects the presence of a HDMI or DVI cable, it will offer the possibility to enable or disable Audio on the wire (see next picture):
This is what tells the TV if the cable carries audio or not. It sometimes happens that you change this option, click apply and the screen doesn’t detect the change. If that’s your case, force the screen to notice by switching to a different resolution, and then switching back to the original one, with the selected audio option. You normally can tell if the screen noticed the change by a small blink or by the screen going black for a moment.
So, you want audio to go through HDMI? Good option…. Let’s see how to do it:
We already know the basic steps:
There is an additional step needed for this:
Didn’t you ask yourself how is it possible that graphics cards take audio out through the HDMI cable? The S/PDIF cable (Sony/Philips Digital Interconnect Format) is the answer. It will take digital audio from your motherboard (taken from a standard interface with the sound card) to the graphics card, and the graphics card will output it to the HDMI cable. This cable is usually a very small, two pin cable, supplied with your graphics card:
See your motherboard and graphics card’s manuals to locate the two pins where to connect the cable. They are also usually marked in the board with labels like: SPDIF or AUDIO. The following are some examples:
This last week, we acquired a Point Of View GeForce GTX 260, just like this one:
We had to invest quite some time in order to make audio work with this card:
1.- The card came with a SPDIF cable, and although the manual mentions the possibility to use it, it didn’t specify where to connect it. There are two free pins in the card but it doesn’t say SPDIF or AUDIO anywhere. Initially, they seem to be some kind of jumpers, as they are marked as JP0 and JP1.
2.- So, we tried using external analog jack-jack, but the nVidia latest driver (197.45) seemed to fail disabling HDMI audio on this card, so our Samsung LCD screen always selected HDMI audio as source. No luck…
3.- As nothing worked, we decided to take the risk and to connect the SPDIF cable to those JP0 and JP1… et voilá! That did the trick. Now we have digital audio running on HDMI.
No manual, specs or information we could found on Point Of View will tell you where to connect the SPDIF cable, so for your reference, here is how you should connect it (white on the right, red on the left, from this perspective and with this connection on the motherboard):
Hope it helps.
Take Care!
CopySourceAsHTML is one of the most useful tools for developers who blog or post code in any form. Now that Visual Studio 2010 is out, it’s time to integrate both tools.
They released a patch and a new version which technically supports 2010, but it was released for the beta version (I guess), and now it doesn´t integrate well with the release version. As Sean mentions in his blog, all you need to do is:
1.- Download CopySourceAsHTML from here
2.- Install it normally, selecting VS 2010 support (it won´t register well in the program though).
3.- Go to the CopySourceAsHTML installation directory, typically:
C:\Program Files (x86)\J.T. Leigh & Associates\CopySourceAsHtml
4.- Copy the contents of the folder
5.- Find what folder is VStudio using for storing the AddIns (there is more than one), in Tools->Options->Add in/Macros Security. Typically (you might have to create this folder):
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft Visual Studio\Addins
6.- Paste the addin file there, re-launch VStudio, and make sure it’s enabled:
7.- Open the file "CopySourceAsHtml.2010.AddIn” and open it with a text editor (it´s an XML file). In every entry <version>9.0</version>, replace the “9.0” with a “10.0”.
And that´s it!
TCPMP on the other hand, although it has been deprecated, perfectly supports AC3 and many other formats, and is still the best player for WM devices.
There is a recomp version specifically compiled for Windows Mobile 6.1 that works flawlessly, and includes most of the plugins available.
You can download from here:
http://www.htcmania.com/showthread.php?t=51241
Don´t worry, it´s free.
One of the best animation videos I’ve seen in a long long time. It’s not just the story, which is great and remind me of great great videogame moments (watching the frog jumping across the street is priceless…), but it’s also very well done. Be sure to watch it!
Cheers!
The following class is a button which can be oriented both horizontally and vertically (like in the picture of your left). Text and image react properly to this orientation and so do their Alignments. The control also includes customizable margins for the text and image inside the button and a SizePercent property for the Image. Please keep in mind that if Orientation is set to “Horizontal”, the normal Draw methods from the base class are called, so all of this properties are ignored. However, you can change this behavior or add any other property very easily if you need it.
- <<Weeks! then it is indeed better to duplicate code than loosing weeks>>
- <<Believe me, it’s better this way. You will thank it, when you grow older…>>
- <<Boss, are you sure we need that change? I like names in the way they are right now>>No prob, you are a bad, but clever developer, so you think:
- <<Our clients don’t>> He replies…
- <<Visual Studio will fix this, I heard somewhere that there’s a thing for these cases called Refactoring>>Then you try to Refactor a whole sentence, and of course, it doesn’t work.
- <<Damn Visual Studio! Damn Microsoft! For things like these is why I prefer Linux! Sure that Linux knows how to Refactor a whole sentence>>And then, you end up making massive text replacements, investing one week trying to find all the instances of the operation, and in fixing the resulting compilation errors. Of course, you forget to change 3 or 4 instances of it. That’s when you go to your boss again and say:
- <<Hey, not that bad. 3 out of 1500, that’s a 99% of success!>>
- <<You are a 99% of an idiot>>… He replies…
| Remember: Duplicating work is bad, but duplicating decisions is one of the worst things you can ever do in software |
- << Who said to use strings? Oh yes, the VisualBasic people… Come on man, do you know how slow is to compare two strings? Player is a core class, that is used all along the game, even in performance critical parts. You cannot be serious… strings… The solution is to use an Int, or an Hex flag.>>As you probably already notice, one can stay like that forever, when there’s a much better solution… Yes, you clever boy, we will use Enumerations. But, do you know why? And what is more important, are you aware of all the benefits (and cons) of an Enumeration? Will talk more on this later, by now lets get deeper in the cons of the other alternatives.
- <<Who said to use an Int or an Hex Flag? Of course! The native people. Why not we all just turn back into binary, you prehistoric monkeys? Will we need to check what “State = 0” is every time we need to use it? Man you cannot be serious… ints… The solution is to use strings…>>
1.- Add a reference to System.Core.Dll, deploy your application as .Net 3.5, and jump to the next chapter
2.- If deploying your application as .Net 3.5 is not an option, you can always add the following code snippet:
Sometimes, you will want to distinguish if a certain piece of your code is being executed at run-time or as a part of the Visual Studio Design-Time calls.
A very easy way of checking this is:
bool isDesignTime = (this.Site != null && this.Site.DesignMode == true);
This is something quite obvious, but some people ask in the forums why they are receiving an exception when trying to open the design view of a form, in Visual Studio. Those exceptions can be caused by many things, but the one explained here is one of the frequent reasons.
Imagine you have developed a custom UserControl class, which needs to do something everything it´s made visible. You will probably override the OnVisibleChanged event to perform that operation. Now, imagine that operation can only be done at runtime. For example, if you need in that operation some data to be loaded, data that won´t be available at Design-Time. Now, imagine that you insert that UserControl into one of your forms.
As you can probably imagine, each time you open that form in the Design View of VisualStudio, the overriden OnVisibleChanged event will be fired, and as that data is not available, you will receive an exception, ruining the initialization of the DesignView, and banning you from editing anything at design time in your form.
In such cases, using the above check will save you from this behavior. Just put that check in the OnVisibleChanged event, and use the mentioned data only if not in Design Time. Et voilá. You have design view operative again.
Cheers!
Today, coming from nowhere, my nVidia control panel stopped working. It is not the first time that happens to me, so I did not worry so much. Things got worse when I rebooted the machine, and saw that my Windows lost the entire nVidia Display Driver. The strange thing was that it didn´t switch back to the VGA adapter. Instead, in the adapter settings you could just read: “Plug&Play monitor in “ and a very scaring whitespace behind. Things got even worse when I saw that, no matter which version I tried, the nVidia display drivers refused to re-install again.
Honestly, I saw myself re-installling windows (something I haven´t done in a long time, I must admit), but as one grows older, accumulates more and more “essential” applications that would take ages to re-install. And now I simply didn´t have the time, so I started investigating. It has taken me the whole afternoon and evening, so hope it helps someone else as well…
Reading forums and forums, I think I tried everything:
All of them with no luck.
In one of the previous steps trying, I noticed that one of the nVidia applications installed (the nVidia PhysX Plugin for MAX), refused to un-install using the standard method. Luckily, it gave a bit more of information: “Access denied trying to access the key HKLM\Software\NVIDIA Corporation\PhysXPluginsForMax”. That caught my attention, as it was obvious that there was a problem with the registry.
Opening Regedit.exe, and navigating to that key, I realized that was not the only nVidia registry key with “Denied Access” problems. You just couldn´t read or modify the contents of keys like: “Global”, “Installers”, or “PhysXPluginsForMax” itself. The only thing you could do with those keys was seeing their security permissions.
The funny thing was that when selecting “Permissions”, you could see a message like the following:
Translation: “You don’t have permissions to read the actual permissions of key “XXX”, but you can make changes in the permissions”. Apart from the fact that seems a tongue twister, it seems a joke. You cannot read your permissions but you can write them? May be it’s a translation bug in the Spanish version of Windows Vista, because you actually can see the permissions, but cannot change them (much more logical).
After opening the window, you will find something like this:
The main problem here is that the box with the label “Names of groups or users” is empty. It means that no-one can actually access this key, and that´s why the Control Panel and the Display Drivers installers are failing.
Note: If this also happens to you, you would worry about what is happening in your system, as having that keys this way is a serious security problem, as any user could get control of them. Please read the conclusions chapter, about what can lead to this situation
Obviously, the way to fix it is just re-assign users permissions to those keys. But how to do that if you don´t have permissions to change the permissions?
Thankfully, one day God thought it was a good idea to create Mark Russinovich and David A. Solomon, the two genius behind SysInternals. Mark also created PS Tools, a suite of tools that help managing Windows. One of the small apps distributed with PSTools is PsExec, which can run processes remotely, and is able to run them inside the SYSTEM account, instead of the current user. And that’s the key to be able to change the registry in this circumstances.
So:
“psexec –s –i regedit.exe”
Regedit will open, but this time from the SYSTEM account, where you should be able to change those keys permissions. Now:
