This year’s Bleeding Edge conference was taking place this week in the beautiful surroundings of Gozd Martuljek. The second day was dedicated to community driven redelivery of Build. As the last session of the day I had a talk on the aspects of reusing existing .NET framework code in Metro applications for Windows 8. I’ve based the contents of the talk on the following Build sessions:

• PLAT-877T: Being pragmatic by leveraging existing code in Metro style apps by Jason Olson
• TOOL-930C: A .NET developer’s view of Windows 8 app development by Krzysztof Cwalina
• TOOL-531T: Using the Windows Runtime from C# and Visual Basic by Harry Pierson and Jesse Kaplan

The slides from my talk are available on SlideShare. Here are the sources for the sample Windows runtime component I've created during the talk.

This week the annual Microsoft conference NT konferenca 2011 was taking place in Portorož. On Tuesday I had a talk there about the Windows API Code Pack. As promised, you can find the slides from this talk on SlideShare.

You can also download the sources for the sample project which is a working WPF MVVM image viewer application demonstrating the implementation of:

• Many Windows 7 taskbar features (jump list, icon overlay, progress state, thumbnail toolbar) with the System.Windows.Shell namespace in .NET 4
• Single instance application pattern with the Taskbar Single Instance Recipe
• Task dialogs
• Windows 7 Libraries
• Application Recovery and Restart with the Windows Restart and Recovery Recipe

The 1.3.0.2918 build of CruiseControl.NET has an error in msbuild.xsl file which causes an XslLoadException to be thrown when trying to view the MSBuild output in the web dashboard. One of the users was nice enough to describe the changes to the file necessary to fix the problem. Unfortunately even the latest version of the file on the CruiseControl.NET Live site doesn't include the changes therefore I'm attaching the file to this post as convenience.

The whitepaper sample code doesn’t exactly follow the guidelines for web development therefore I wrote my own sample with clearly separated HTML structure, CSS styles and JavaScript code. I decided to make it publicly available in case anyone else finds it useful. A few things are worth mentioning.

• Empty XHTML tags. For some reason the XHTML style empty tags don’t work as expected when they are filled from JavaScript code. It seems as if the engine would parse them as opened tags without the corresponding closing tag. Therefore you should always use the long form <span id=”mySpan”></span> instead of the short one <span id=”mySpan” />. This problem seems to be specific for gadgets. The same code runs just fine in IE7.
• Localization. I haven’t managed to get the localization to work at all. I suppose the engine uses the files from the locale directory corresponding to the current display language not the locale settings. This does make sense but with only English language available in Vista there’s no way to check that the current file organization in my sample gadget is really ok. I kept it in the sample since I’m pretty convinced that it is.
• Deployment. If you double click a file with a .gadget extension in Vista, you will automatically start the gadget installation process. The file needs to be a zip or cab archive containing the actual gadget directory structure. Vista behaves as if an application setup was started. This means that you should sign the file to increase the end user trust. You can use the Sign Tool to do that but in this case you need to make a cab file since zip files can’t be signed with it. I tried to make the cab file using a CAB Project template in Visual Studio 2005 but I couldn’t make the correct directory structure. I ended up using Cabarc. After all, I only had to run the following line in the gadget directory to build the cab file correctly.
  cabarc –p –r N ..\HelloWorld.gadget *

I wrote this program because I was unsatisified with available programs for managing the personal recipe collection. I wanted to have nice printouts, extensive search capabilities and simple entering of new recipes. A Slovenian user interface was also important.

Because I found nothing that would suite my needs I wrote this program myself. The recipe collection is stored in the database, the interface makes editing, searching and printing simple. The collection is organised in a two level tree hierarchy, preentered ingredients, measurement units and recipe sources make entering recipes quicker.

The program is based on existing Microsoft technology: database management system (Access and MS SQL Server / MSDE are supported), ADO for database access, Internet Explorer user control. Rapid application development tool Visual Basic was used to bind all this technology into one application. The downside of the technologies used are the requirements to have all of them installed on the client computer. Most users should already have them but just in case all the above mentioned technologies link to their downloads.

The program only has Slovenian user interface, therefore it will be of limited use for those who don't speak it. The program probably won't be developed any more.

This project demonstrates the use of machine learning methods (genetic algorithms and nearest neighbours algorithm in particular) in real time navigation in unknown environment with given constraints. Apart from complete implementation with Delphi sources included (detailed explanation below) the project also features lots of interesting ideas in regard to attributes collection needed for such a navigation.

For the needs of the project I have developed the simulation environment (simulating the movement of an agent in a 2D map) with a nice GUI and a built-in editor with map managment that could be of use even for other projects. More specific is a very flexible object oriented implementation of the genetic algorithms and a simple implementation of basic nearest neigbours algorithm. All the source code is nicely organized and layed out and as such suitable for reuse and extending.

The archive also contains some sample data which directly demonstrates the really impressive results that where achieved with these methods and a quite extensive technical report which is unfortunately written in Slovene as I had to submit it at university. The source code should be completely useable even without understanding this document but you'll of course miss some of the explanations.

As a part of the Artificial Intelligence and Symbolic Programming course at university me and a group of fellow students (in alphabetical order: Uros Cibej, Matija Jekovec, Gregor Leban, Mitja Lustrek, Martin Znidarsic) under the supervision of Aleks Jakulin got involved in a project which tried to achieve sensible tactical behavior of a group of soldiers controlled by a human player at a higher abstraction level.

Although the project was only meant as a learning polygon for different approaches to real time tactical artificial intelligence, we still achieved quite satisfactory results. A short presentation at the end of the course classes that was extremely well received got us an invitation to the Solomon seminar at Jozef Stefan Institute.

The complete project can be found in the downloads section of my site. It consists of the source codes which are due to the experimental nature of project pretty messy and need Simple DirectMedia Layer libraries and Visual C++ 6 to be compiled, a brief technical report which describes the used algorithms, a Power Point presentation for the Solomon seminar and a set of animations in DivX format which demonstrate the interesting behavior of the soldiers.

Unfortunately most of the above materials are in Slovenian language and will therefore be of limited use to the non-Slovenian speakers. The only exceptions to this are probably the source codes and the animations.

Files available for download:

• AITGanim.zip (11.28 MB) - Selected set of animations
• AITGdoc.zip (473.88 KB) - Brief technical report in Slovenian
• AITGppt.zip (668.73 KB) - Presentation in Slovenian
• AITGsrc.zip (758.34 KB) - Project source codes

After a fractal lecture as a part of the computer graphics course at uni a friend of mine wrote a program in Delphi which interactively demonstrated how easy it is to construct interesting images by adjusting the fractal parameters. I liked the idea and thought that it would be great to have such a program written in Java 1.1 so that it would work in every Java aware browser.

Tree Fractal applet is the result of this idea. The archive contains complete source code, a jar archive with compiled classes and a html page for viewing in a browser.

TV-Logo is a program for displaying logotypes of TV stations. To use it you only need a plain Amiga (any Amiga will do, as long as it has KS 2.0 and a working floppy drive). Of course you'll also need a genlock to compose the Amiga output with the TV signal.

As you probably already noticed, the requirements are really low for such a program. Most similar programs need better Amigas and usually a hard disk, too. This program was designed to offer a simple solution to those who have smaller Amigas, but would still like to use them for such purposes. The program of course also works on better Amigas and can take use of hard disks, but these aren't required.

According to the low requirements, the program features are not exactly the best in comparison to other programs (these would result in bigger exe size and higher requirements), but still they offer enough to make the user happy.

The program offers easy switching among ten different source pictures for logotypes, ten preset logos (with specified size, RGB correction, position and ten different texts each (with configurable colour, size, font and style)) available at a touch of a button and several other useful features.