|
|
Mirrored Weblogs
-
|
Just added the following comment to: https://github.com/loarabia/ManagedMediaHelpers/issues/15 Managed Media Helpers contains the very useful Mp3MediaSource class for .NET / Silverlight / Windows Phone. Added compile-time SWITCHES and respective code to Silverlight demo code for PRELOAD (into memory stream) and AUTOPLAY (this was a bit tricky, need to call Play at MediaOpened event, not right after […]...
|
-
|
This session is so awesome, I just had to post it here so that I Read more...
|
-
|
at http://zachis.it/blog/7-dangers-of-using-windows-server-on-a-wordpress-installation/ the thing that guy says about Permalinks isn’t accurate at all (not that the other things that he says are any accurate that is). WordPress Codex have documentation on how to configure URL rewriting in web.config that is necessery for Permalinks to work in IIS. e.g. at http://ClipFlair.net, if you press the "about" […]...
|
-
|
Opportunities If you are ready to ask the big questions, to work to make technology better, and push the edge on innovation, let’s make it happen together. At Microsoft we offer you the opportunity to start your global career. With a presence in 190 countries you have the chance to impact users around the world. Software Engineers at Microsoft are passionate about building technologies that make the world a better place. Work on software applications and services for consumers, gamers, developers, or large enterprise customers. Our teams touch all levels of the stack, so you will find the technology that excites you. Your efforts on the design, development, and testing of next-generation applications will have an impact on millions of people. Software Development: New Graduate and Intern Qualifications: · Pursuing a Bachelor’s, Master’s or Ph.D. degree in Engineering, Computer Science or related field · 1-2+ years of experience programming in C/C++, Java, C# or other computer programming languages preferred ·...
|
-
|
Two days left for AzureConf 2014, if you haven’t registered for it yet now is Read more...
|
-
|
The Microsoft Azure Storage Team released their latest Azure Storage Client Libraries and Tools which Read more...
|
-
|
Today the Azure Media Services team announced a new tool, namely the Azure Media Services Read more...
|
-
|
Just fixed a nasty bug in ClipFlair Studio (http://studio.clipflair.net), where one couldn’t click hyperlinks in the Text component when set at ReadOnly mode. In that mode hyperlinks should open up new web pages (in Edit mode you can edit/remove them only of course), but instead when clicked they would show something like a focus rectangle […]...
|
-
|
If you’re in a hurry, you can find the complete source code on GitHub: https://github.com/dgkanatsios/TowerDefense It is recommended that you read part 1 before proceeding on reading the rest of this tutorial, since it is heavily based on what we described in the first part! Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you!!! This is the second post in 2 post tutorial regarding making a tower defense in Unity. In the first post we described the game scenario and gameplay and we also mentioned the level editor, the XML file and structure that holds level information and the object pooler methodology we use. Again, if you haven’t read it, I strongly encourage you to do it ASAP, this post will be much clearer after that! We’ll start by exploring the prefabs we have in our game. The RootGO gameobject In the instructions we gave at the previous post about making a new level, we mentioned dragging a prefab called “ RootGO ” to the scene. Let’s see this object’s children in detail. PathPieces PathPieces is an empty game object that acts...
|
-
|
If you’re in a hurry, you can find the complete source code on GitHub: https://github.com/dgkanatsios/TowerDefense Unless you’ve been living in a cave in the recent years, you surely must have played a Tower Defense style game. Be it Plants vs Zombies, Kingdom Rush, geoDefense, Jelly Defense or any other, I’m sure you’ve spent much quality time setting up your defenses, killing enemies and advancing stages. So, since it’s one of the most common game types you can find on the application stores out there, I decided to try my luck and create one from scratch, using Unity3D and present it in this tutorial. Since it’s a bit bigger compared to my previous efforts, it will be split in two parts. In this first post, we’ll describe the game, the level editor, the respective XML creation and parsing and the object pool used in the game to increase performance. Check the screenshot below to get a taste of how the game looks like, running on the Unity editor. Scenario and gameplay are both pretty basic, actually. Badgers...
|
-
|
PivotViewer is an impressive Silverlight control (see my usage at http://gallery.clipflair.net), however Microsoft never released it for WPF. One could work arround this by embedding Silverlight in their WPF app using the WebBrowser control and talking to it via the JavaScript Bridge of Silverlight, however they could also embed one of those HTML5 PivotViewer-compatible controls […]...
|
-
|
at http://www.mono-software.com/Mono/Pages/Discussion/dtopic/_YyUBIlx5kiqHaNqAQeltg/br-brake-bug-in-IE11-and-clipflair-text-editor/ one reads: We are using Telerik’s rich text editor (RadEditor), and it seems that RadEditor has specific behaviour regarding insertion of break tags. To circumvent this issue please try to add host header in ISS 7 (website level): Name = "X-UA-Compatible" Value = "IE=EmulateIE10" Or, you can insert Html Meta tag on a […]...
|
-
|
This is my contribution to: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2652816/what-is-the-difference-between-document-location-href-and-document-location Here is an example of the practical significance of the difference and how it can bite you if you don’t realize it (document.location being an object and document.location.href being a string): We use MonoX Social CMS (http://mono-software.com) free version at http://social.ClipFlair.net and we wanted to add the language bar […]...
|
-
|
I just noticed that on Internet Explorer 11 developer tools console (appears when you press F12 key), there is a drop-down where you can select the rendering engine used. Edge means the very latest (IE11 one in this case) and you can select back to version 5. Interestingly, there is no version 6 in the […]...
|
-
|
<xsl:template match="cxml:Item" mode="col"> <xsl:variable name="FILENAME" select="…someXPathQuery…"/> <xsl:variable name="IMAGE" select="concat(‘http://gallery.clipflair.net/activity/image/’, $FILENAME, ‘.png’)"/> … I got confused a bit today after a long day of fiddling with XSL and ClipFlair Activity Gallery’s CXML (Collection XML) data (as used in PivotViewer control), and didn’t understand why I couldn’t use an XSL variable’s (FILENAME in the sample […]...
|
-
|
While trying to generate a single HTML page that will list all ClipFlair activities using XSL Transformations (XSLT), I had the need to group items in 2-column rows. This is my contribution to other solutions suggested at (if you like it you can vote it up there): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9908488/xslt-for-each-wrapping-every-nth-item-in-a-div/ Faced by the same problem, that is […]...
|
-
|
In C/C++ and C# one has useful prefix (++index) and postfix (index++) increment operators and corresponding decrement ones. Although they have a single operant, they’re not working like functions as single + or – prefix would do, but instead they cause side-effects – they edit the variable passed to them. The prefix increment operator first […]...
|
-
|
I’ve been using various small XAML storyboard utilities and behaviors in my latest Window Phone and Windows Store apps. I’ve just packaged them all and released them into GitHub . Universal Helpers may not be that good of a name since the library is pretty small (yet) but I hope to enhance it in the future with more utilities and behaviors. So, let’s jump right in and see what’s under the hood! First of all, there are some Blend Behaviors. I love behaviors! Easy just as a Drag’n’Drop, yet so powerful! What’s even more great is that Windows 8.1 SDK has a Behaviors SDK , which, to no one's surprise, works with Windows Phone 8.1 Store apps. A limitation right now is that you can’t (at least easily ) write Behaviors in a portable class library, that’s why I’ve implemented them in the Shared project. Let’s see them, one by one. DragElementBehavior This behavior allows any element with a CompositeTransform to be dragged. It has options for inertia plus a container, in order to never be out of bounds (either by dragging...
|
-
|
Last time I posted something around Angry Birds was 3 years ago, when I blogged about a 5’ creation of Angry Birds with 0 lines of code using XAML, Behaviors and Expression Blend . Well, it wasn’t exactly a clone, but it simulated on how to implement some basic dragging/collision/particles functionality with the Farseer Physics Engine. This blog post serves as an attempt to create a single level (with reusable components, long live the prefab!) of Angry Birds using Unity3D platform. The game features a single level, 3 birds for the user to throw, 3 pigs that the user has to destroy, parallax backgrounds, a maximum strength for the bird (we cannot drag the bird more than a predefined distance), animations with the help of the excellent GoKit library, a projection of the trajectory of the bird (so we can more or less predict where it’ll land), the user’s ability to drag the screen to see the entire scene, pinch to zoom ability (for multitouch devices) and a small trail that is left by the bird when it’s thrown....
|
-
|
In this post I will go through the process of debugging eXpandFramework for each of the distribution channel. The sources If you download the sources either from GitHub or our download page or our build server you need to run the buildall64.cmd file located in the root folder. The batch will generate the symbol files (pdb) and will register the assemblies in the GAC. Debugging is enabled by default since symbols and sources are in place. The Nuget packages eXpandFramework is distributed through Nuget and since version 14.1.4.8 and with the excellent GitHubLink project provides frictionless debug experience as long as Symbol Server support is enabled under your VS/Options/Debugging settings. The symbols are in the same package as the dll so expect the package size to be at least double in size. We will consider a better implementation if there are requests. GitHubLink patches the symbols so to request the assembly sources from the online GitHub repo so there is not need to have the sources in place. The Binaries...
|
-
|
Last month I had the opportunity to speak at a Microsoft event about best patterns Read more...
|
-
|
In the C# compiler error case shown above, CaptionsGrid class exists in namespace ClipFlair.CaptionsGrid so in the code we have “using ClipFlair.CaptionsGrid;” at the top of the file where we want to call the “SaveAudio” static method of CaptionsGrid class. But then we get the error “The type or namespace name ‘…’ does not exist […]...
|
-
|
Unless you’ve been living in a cave or visiting outer space for the past months, you have certainly played Flappy Bird , one of the most successful games for mobile devices. Hence, I decided to give it a shot and recreate it using Unity. Needless to mention that all graphics and sounds found in the tutorial are used only for educational purposes and do not intend to harm any intellectual property at all circumstances. The sprite sheet used was found here http://www.spriters-resource.com/mobile_phone/flappybird/sheet/59537/ whereas the sounds were extracted from this youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY0sZUJWwA8 So, let’s start with the small tutorial! This game’s development has many aspects, we’ll attempt to touch all of them one by one. First of all, we used Unity’s spritesheet editor to “slice” the spritesheet and get references to specific sprites Then, we created a small animation to simulate the flight course of the bird (this can be easily accomplished if you drag-drop the relevant sprites into...
|
-
|
I had blogged in the past about a simple puzzle game in XNA . Nothing better than to recreate it in Unity with a tutorial, of course! To begin with, here’s a screenshot of the game running on the editor The purpose of the game is to tap/click on the pieces next to the empty one so that they exchange positions. It goes on and one until you make the pieces appear as in the original photo. To begin with, we’ll need a photo. The best way to save yourself from copyright issues and not having to read licenses etc is to use a photo that you took! So, we need to slice it. For this purpose, we’ll use Unity’s native 2D tools and its sprite editor. Once we set the sprite mode to multiple, we can use the sprite editor to ‘slice’ our image. Since the image does not have an alpha channel, we’ll use Grid slicing. Moreover, we’ll name our exported sprites with a name that contains their location information (i.e. piece-0-0 => this implies that the sprite’s “correct” location is on the top left corner of our game). Plus, we’ll...
|
-
|
Some time ago I did a blog post about the famous Arkanoid game and its adaptation to Windows Phone using XNA. Couple of weeks ago, I attempted to recreate it from scratch using the Unity game engine and, to no surprise, it was pretty a piece of cake. Below you can see a screenshot from the start screen of the game. Let’s do a lap around the project. First of all, we have one and only one scene, the game one. We have a Camera, set to Orthographic projection (most suitable for 2D games) a directional light a GameManager gameobject which holds the GameManager script, in charge of running our game the Ball which goes around on the level the Paddle which is the means that the user will utilize in order to prevent the Ball from touching the floor the Floor, which if collided with the Ball will decrease player’s lives the SideBlocks which just make the Ball stay in our level and, of course, the Blocks which have to be hit by the Ball (via user’s assistance) and are organized in four BlockRow objects Purpose of the game...
|
|
|
|