Component Glue v1.0

I finally brought Component Glue up to a state where I felt like the product was finished. You can get it via NuGet:

PM> Install-Package ComponentGlue

or you can get the source from GitHub. The documentation is definitely sparse I know but I recommend taking a look at the unit tests to get a feel for what you can do with Component Glue.

Credit for the NuGet CSS here.

GLDotNet Version 0.6.0

I just released GLDotNet Version 0.6.0.

Changelog:

  • GLDotNet.Toolkit: Assembly containing simple app framework.
  • GLDotNet.Objects: Assembly containing higher level objects such as Texture2D and VertexBuffer.
  • More overloads added to GLContext class.
  • byte and sbyte are now mapped correctly in generated code.
  • Fixed the naming of some functions so as not to include type notation, i.e. Color4u.
  • Decreased the number of enum values output.

Introducing GLDotNet

Today I released a project I’ve been playing around with for a year or so on Codeplex. It’s called GLDotNet. From the project description:

C# wrapper for OpenGL. Partially generated from the OpenGL spec and partially written by hand, the aim is to have a flexible and native feeling C# binding.

I have generated functions from the OpenGL spec excluding 1 or 2 but unfortunately of the generated code is untested. There is a demo project included in the source code. The Github repository is located here: https://github.com/smack0007/GLDotNet

GLDotNet

WinQuakeCon

I’ve always wanted a program that would allow me have a command line that I could slide in and out of view as needed like the console from Quake. I never could find one and so I finally got decided to write a tool myself. A picture is below and the source code is on GitHub.

I’m not putting a download here as I don’t consider this finished just yet.

What is Snowball and what do I want to do with it?

I originally got the idea for Snowball after working with the Xna Framework. The Xna Framework is a good piece of software for what it is but there are some things about which I just do not agree with:

  • The content pipeline only works with content in the serialized .xnb format.
  • There are certain content types which can only be loaded via the content pipeline.
  • Certain features don’t exist on the PC because they don’t exist on the XBox or Windows Phone 7.

Xna was designed as an abstraction layer for all the 3 platforms mentioned in the last point, so that one is somewhat understandable. I don’t want to write games for my XBox right now though, so why should things like drawing lines not be available to me?

With these points in mind I started working on Snowball. It’s designed to be an Xna like framework for making 2D games. It uses SlimDX on the backend, but that is completely abstracted away from consumers of the framework. What I want to do is design the API so that the backend can be swapped out somewhat painlessly.

I still have a ways to go before I will consider it a version 1.0 release. As of this writing, I’m transitioning to more of a ContentLoader class style for loading your game’s content. Any resource type from within the framework can be loaded by hand if you want, the ContentLoader class will just make it easier. After that I have a few other features like GamePad and Music which I would like to implement before saying I have a Beta type release.

The future after that is up in the air. I would love to try and have different implementations of the API for Xna and/or OpenTK.

I recommend for anyone who is interested as to why an API designer choose to implement the API in the way they did to try it for themselves. I have learned many things from this project including why certain design decisions were made by the Xna Framework team.

Zune Playlist / SMIL Copier

I needed a tool that would copy the contents of a Zune playlist to a given directory. I did a bit of googling and I couldn’t find anything, so like any good nerd I wrote a tool that did.

SMILCopier

The format of Zune playlists is a simple XML format known as SMIL. I think Windows Media Player also stores playlists in this format but I haven’t confirmed that yet.

I wrote the tool very quickly and have only tested it on my machine with my test data, but I’ll provide the source if you’d like to modify for yourself. The source is C#.

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Progress Bar in Windows 7 Taskbars

I decided to add progress bar to the Windows 7 Taskbar in my Timer app.

I started by downloading and compiling the Windows API Code Pack in Release mode. I then added a reference to the Microsoft.WindowsAPICodePack.dll and Microsoft.WindowsAPICodePack.Shell.dll files to the project. After that add the lines:

using Microsoft.WindowsAPICodePack.Taskbar;

to your using statements. When the clock starts running I create the progress bar in the taskbar with:

// Initialize progress bar
if(TaskbarManager.IsPlatformSupported)
{
	TaskbarManager.Instance.SetProgressState(TaskbarProgressBarState.Normal);
	TaskbarManager.Instance.SetProgressValue(0, (int)this.totalTime.TotalSeconds, this.Handle);
}

to stop the progress bar:

// Stop progress bar
if(TaskbarManager.IsPlatformSupported)
	TaskbarManager.Instance.SetProgressState(TaskbarProgressBarState.NoProgress);

and finally to update the progress bar on each tick:

// Update progress bar
if(TaskbarManager.IsPlatformSupported)
	TaskbarManager.Instance.SetProgressValue((int)this.totalTime.TotalSeconds - (int)this.time.TotalSeconds, (int)this.totalTime.TotalSeconds, this.Handle);

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