Online Articles
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Adventures in Electronic Music: Beeps, Bloops, and Klangs: 1974–1982
describes how I spent the late 1970s and early 1980s building electronic music instruments, including a computer-controlled
digital synthesizer capable of generating 40 simultaneous voices. Included are photographs, other documents,
and over 4 hours of virtually unlistenable "music."
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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.
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Articles in MSDN Magazine
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DirectX Factor: Constructing Audio Oscillators for Windows 8 (February 2013)
shows two different approaches to making a variable-frequency oscillator in XAudio2.
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DirectX Factor: Windows 8 Sound Generation with XAudio2 (January 2013)
begins an exploration of playing sounds and music using XAudio2 in Windows 8 programs.
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Touch and Go: A Touch Interface for an Orienting Map (December 2012)
displays a map that rotates with the Windows Phone orienation and zooms with touch.
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Touch and Go: Assembling Bing Map Tiles on Windows Phone (November 2012)
covers the basics of downloading ahd displaying map tiles on Windows Phone.
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Touch and Go: Viewing the Night Sky on Your Windows Phone
(October 2012) presents an astronomy program for Windows Phone 7.5 with a orientation sensitive view of the night sky.
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Touch and Go: Exploring Spherical Coordinates on Windows Phone
(September 2012) prepares for the October issue with an exploration of spherical coordinates under Windows Phone 7.5.
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Touch and Go: Viewing a Virtual World from Your Windows Phone
(August 2012) shows a program to let you view large images by changing the orientation or a Windows Phone 7.5.
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Touch and Go: Windows Phone Motion and 3D Views
(July 2012) has an XNA program for Windows Phone 7.5 that uses the phone's orientation to view 3D objects.
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Touch and Go: Getting Oriented with the Windows Phone Compass
(June 2012) explores interactions between the accelerometer and compass on Windows Phone 7.5.
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Touch and Go: Musical Instruments for Windows Phone
(April 2012) uses the streaming audio facilities in Windows Phone to create a harp and theremin.
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Touch and Go: Streaming Audio in Windows Phone
(March 2012) explores how to generate audio information in real time in a Windows Phone application.
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Touch and Go: Background Audio on Windows Phone 7.5
(February 2012) explores the enhancements in Windows Phone 7.1 for playing audio files in the background
even while the application is no longer running.
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Touch and Go: Playing Audio Files on Windows Phone
(January 2012)
shows how to play audio files from either isolated storage or the web. Plus, an interview with editor-in-chief
Michael Desmond commemorates my
Quarter Century and Counting with MSDN Magazine.
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UI Frontiers: Video Feeds on Windows Phone 7
(December 2011) shows how to display and modify the video feed, including turning the video into a kaleidoscope.
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UI Frontiers: Finishing the E-Book Reader (November 2011)
puts together the final pieces of Phree Book Reader, which lets you download, save, and read free public-domain plain-text
books from Project Gutenberg.
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UI Frontiers: Pages and Pop-ups in Windows Phone 7 (October 2011)
shows how to create the Windows Phone equivalent of dialog boxes in the context of a program that lets you read four classics of
horror.
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UI Frontiers: Touch for Text (September 2011)
demonstrates how tricky it can be allowing the user to select text in a Windows Phone program. Included is an ebook
reader for Charles Dicken's Bleak House.
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UI Frontiers: Font Metrics in Silverlight (August 2011)
describes how to empirically determine font metric information in Silverlight and use it to perform
fast text layout. Included is an ebook reader for Windows Phone for Anthony Trollope's Phineas Finn.
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UI Frontiers: Page Transitions in Windows Phone 7 (July 2011)
is not actually about transitioning between instances of PhoneApplicationPage but how to transition quickly
between pages in a Windows Phone ebook reader. The sample program let's you read George Eliot's Middlemarch
on your Windows Phone
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UI Frontier: Principles of Pagination (June 2011)
demonstrates pagination for the printer, but also for Jane Austen's novel Emma
in a program for Windows Phone.
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UI Frontiers: Silverlight
Printing Basics (May 2011) innocently explores the printing support in Silverlight 4
without quite realizing where it will lead.
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UI Frontiers: Lissajous
Animations in Silverlight (April 2011) fabricates an oscilloscope for
Silverlight and Windows Phone.
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UI Frontiers: Touch
Gestures on Windows Phone (March 2011) explores the gesture interface
included in the new Windows Phone 7 Toolkit available on CodePlex.
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UI Frontiers: Sound Recording in
Windows Phone 7 (February 2011) strips down a user interface to the bare essentials
for a program that records and plays back spoken memos.
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UI Frontiers: A Color Scroll for XNA
(January 2011) reproduces one of the first Windows programs written for Microsoft Systems Journal
using XNA for Windows Phone 7.
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UI Frontiers: Silverlight, Windows Phone 7,
and the Multi-Touch Thumb (December 2010) explores the humble Thumb control as a short-cut to
introducing touch into your Silverlight applications.
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UI Frontiers: The Intricacies of
Touch Controls (November 2010) tries to reproduce the date and time pickers in Windows Phone 7.
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UI Frontiers: Multi-Touch Inertia
(October 2010) explores the inertia support in WPF.
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UI Frontiers: Touch and Response
(September 2010) looks at alternatives in handling Manipulation events in WPF.
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UI Frontiers: Multi-Touch Manipulation
Events in WPF (August 2010) is an introduction to the WPF Manipulation events.
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UI Frontiers: The Fluid UI in
Silverlight 4 (July 2010) looks at the support of fluid entrances and exits.
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UI Frontiers: The Ins and Outs
of ItemsControl (June 2010) shows how to design an ItemsControl so that items seem
to move fluidly in and out.
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UI Frontiers: Thinking Outside the
Grid (May 2010) explores the differences between Grid and Canvas that allow some
interesting tricks.
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UI Frontiers: Projection
Transforms Sans Math (April 2010) discusses how to use the Silverlight Projection
transform without getting embroiled in 3D mathematics.
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Finger Style: Exploring
Multi-Touch Support in Silverlight (March 2010) is a feature article about the
Silverlight 3 Touch.FrameReported event. The article includes a multi-touch
piano.
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UI Frontiers: MIDI
Music in WPF Applications (March 2010) continues exploring the NAudio library.
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Extreme UI: Line Charts
with Data Templates (January 2010) continues with techniques shown in the September issue.
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WPF Foundations:
Charting with Data Templates
(September, 2009) shows how to use data templates to create bar graphs and pie charts.
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WPF Foundations:
Customizing the New WPF
Calendar Controls (June, 2009) shows how to use templates and derived classes to extend the basic
calendar and provide additional functionality and visuals.
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WPF Foundations:
Writing More Efficient
ItemsControls (March, 2009) describes several strategies when your DataTemplates
bog down with too many items in an ItemsControl or ListBox.
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WPF Foundations:
Render Text On A Path With WPF (December 2008)
shows several approaches to positioning text characters on a graphics path.
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WPF Foundations:
Dependency Properties And Notifications
(September 2008)
discusses how to get change notifications for properties and collections.
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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 September 11, 2008.
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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, 2012
cp@charlespetzold.com
This page last updated May 2012