Works in Progress
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The Mathematics of Miracles:
Charles Babbage and the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. Read the daily drafts!
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Mistaken in its Age:
William Cowper and the Age of the Earth. Read the daily drafts!
Online Articles
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How Far from True North are the Avenues of Manhattan? (July 2005)
A long-awaited answer to this pressing question determined with
a little trigonometry and the Google Maps API. (The answer is 29°.)
This is the calculation alluded to the New York Times article
City of Angles (July 2, 2006).
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Modern-day creationists have claimed Victorian physicist James Clerk Maxwell
as one of their own.
Maxwell, Molecules, and Evolution (February 2005),
analyzes the evidence and discovers that Maxwell's
attitude toward evolution was more nuanced than people assume.
Talks and Speeches
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Windows 1.0 and the Applications of Tomorrow
is a mini-keynote (and exercise in retro-computing)
delivered at DevConnections on November 7, 2005.
Included is a full explanation of all the "magic tricks" involved in the presentation.
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Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?
Ruminations on the psychology and aesthetics of coding,
a talk delivered at the NYC .NET Developer’s Group, October 20, 2005.
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In Search of the Real-Time Drop Shadow (March 2005)
explores different ways of programmatically applying drop shadow to text drawn on the Tablet PC.
The programs were originally prepared for a talk on February 9, 2005 at the
Windows Anywhere Conference.
.
Articles in MSDN Magazine
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WPF Foundations:
Bitmaps and Pixel Bits (June 2008)
explores RenderTargetBitmap and WriteableBitmap.
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WPF Foundations:
Vector Graphics and the WPF Shape Class (March 2008)
shows how to derive from Shape for custom graphics element.
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WPF Foundations:
Templates for Uncommon Controls (January 2008)
shows how to write replaceable templates for custom controls.
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WPF Foundations:
3D Text in WPF (October 2007)
describes techniques to display text in 3D.
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WPF Foundations:
Extending the WPF Animation Classes (July 2007)
shows how to animation whole collections of Point objects.
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WPF Foundations:
3D Mesh Geometries (April 2007)
discusses the basics and explores issues in creating cylinders.
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End Bracket:
Let My People Code (February 2007)
makes the case for hand-coded XAML.
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WPF Foundations:
Using Templates to Customize WPF Controls (January 2007)
shows templates for ScrollBar, Slider, and ProgressBar.
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Get a sneak peak at "Avalon", the client programming interface
for the next major release of Windows ("Longhorn"),
in
Code Name Avalon:
Create Real Apps Using New Code and Markup Model (January 2004).
(Historical note: Avalon and Longhorn became the Windows Presentation Foundation and Vista.)
Interviews
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Long interview on the Internet audio talk show
.NET Rocks!
on August 23, 2004.
There's also a
transcript.
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Amazon.com Interview from October 1999.
Recipes
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Join us for pizza with
Charles & Deirdre's Sunday Evening Low-Fat Vegetarian Sausage Pizza
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It's an old family recipe:
Spice Crumb Cake
that's too good for just breakfast.
Miscellaneous
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Programmed Solutions to "Enigma" Problems from New Scientist Magazine,
May 2005 to February 2006.
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Windows utilities I wrote for PC Magazine
between 1997 and 2002 are no longer free but may illustrate useful programming techniques.
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Favorite books on the history of computing
originally prepared for the Barnes & Noble web site in April 2000.
© Charles Petzold, 2008
cp@charlespetzold.com
This page last updated June 2008