In December 2008 — between the election of Barack Obama and his inauguration — the Bush administration decided to give a farewell present to the oil industry by selling off drilling rights on parcels of public land in Utah's pristine redrock area. A 27-year-old environmental activist and University of Utah student named Tim DeChristopher showed up at the auction, was asked if he had come to bid, said that he was, and was given a bidding paddle with the number 70.
Something like the fifth movie version of The Great Gatsby is opening today, but it's silly to actually go see such a thing. The novel itself is quite short. You can probably read it in less time than it would take to go and see the movie, and you'll emerge from the experience much more fulfilled and satisfied because you'll have read F. Scott Fitzgerald's original novel rather what appears to be — at least judging from the trailers — a crazed 3D monstrosity by Baz Luhrmann.
Sometimes a programmer will encounter a situation where it's convenient to embed a changeable data value in a paragraph of text, and for this paragraph to re-wrap itself when the text representation of this data value acquires a different character width.
Windows 8 has some exceptionally powerful facilities for working with sound, and in the latest installment of the DirectX Factor column in MSDN Magazine I show how to display a file picker that allows you to select an MP3 or WMA file from your Windows 8 Music Library, display cover art as well as album and artist information, load and decode the file using the Media Foundation APIs, and shovel the resultant audio buffers into XAudio2 voices to play back the file.
Do you know that movie that starts out with a far-off view of Earth from outer space, and then the camera seems to move in closer and closer as if you're heading towards Earth in a rocket, and in what seems to be one continuous take you plunge through the clouds and go straight down to the Earth's surface, with more and more detail quickly coming into view, and then you zoom right into someone's backyard, and two people are sitting by the side of a swimming pool, and one of them is dead?
As I was methodically converting all the Windows 8 C# code in Programming Windows, 6th edition to C++, it was always nice to come across one of the many programs in the book that do their thing entirely in XAML. Those projects didn't require any new C++ code and worked the same as the C# versions.
This evening is the presentation of Academy Awards for movies released in 2012. Here's my ranking of the nine "Best Picture" nominees from best to worst (despite the impossibility of comparing movies that are very different in ambition, scope, and subject matter).
Chapter 10 of Programming Windows 6th edition shows how to use the Matrix3DProjection class to transform a rectanglur element into any arbitrary convex quadrilateral:
I am very pleased to announced that on February 12, 2013, I will be speaking at a meeting of vNext Orange County (California) beginning at 6:00 PM. Here are the details as announced by vNext:
How long does it take to write a thousand-page programming tutorial? I began the 6th edition of Programming Windows on February 27, 2012, and subsequently worked on it pretty much full time except for the monthly installments of my MSDN Magazine column. I finished reviewing pages on the last day of 2012 and emailed the ZIP file containing all the C# and C++ sample code to my editor on the morning of January 17, 2013, officially concluding my work.
I am thrilled to announce that beginning in the January 2013 issue of MSDN Magazine, I will be writing a new column called DirectX Factor focusing on using DirectX in Windows 8 (and Windows Phone 8) applications. You can read the first installment on line, as well as Michael Desmond's Editor's Note about the new column.
The Metropolitan Opera has revived their production of Hector Berlioz's exuberantly audacious Les Troyens ("The Trojans") and I'd really like to see it. But I've spent most of 2012 writing a book for peanuts, and I'm flat broke. I'll either be buying tickets in a section of the opera house requiring oxygen tanks, or taking advantage of something I've never tried before: Rush tickets.
Programmers returning to C++ after spending some years with C# are likely to have forgotten a few basics, or might not quite grasp how XAML fits in with the big picture. That's certainly the case for me as I'm becoming multilingual in Windows 8 programming! Here's an example of something that has gotten me several times.
It must have been about 20 years ago. I was at a friend’s house and he showed me a new videogame called Wolfenstein 3D. My friend enjoyed the dynamics of the game, which involved — as best I can recall — a first-person perspective of an armed soldier chasing people on the screen, and shooting and killing them.
About 11 years ago, while writing my first book about Windows Forms programming, I became interested in the technique of rendering circular arcs using Bézier curves, and I read a couple articles on the subject from one of the many periodicals available at the New York Public Library:
The following code shows some simple finger-tracking (or mouse tracking or pen tracking) code for Windows 8. The MainPage.xaml file instantiates a Grid named contentGrid, and the code displays pointer input with a Polyline element. The Polyline element is created during the OnPointerPressed override, a Point is added to this Polyline during the OnPointerMoved override, and it's completed in OnPointerReleased. (For more details, consult the Touch chapter of my book Programming Windows, 6th edition.)
Yesterday was Small Business Saturday, a shopping holiday invented a couple years ago by a company that definitely doesn't qualify as a small business. Yet, the concept is quite appealing: Surely for one day a year we can draw specific attention to those small neighborhood stores that we patronize all year round, and we can do so without a mass stampede to find "bargains."