Content tagged with [coding4fun] on DuncanMackenzie.net

New Xbox Friends Gadget released and a Silverlight Gamercard Generator

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:05:00 GMT

Adam Kinney, Silverlight dude and my colleague at work, has released an updated version of his Xbox Friends Watch gadget and a new standalone gamercard gadget for your website that uses Silverlight 2.0.

The code for my blog site is now available on codeplex.com

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 05:56:00 GMT

For anyone who is interested in using the code behind this site for their own blog, or who just finds reading code to be a fun pastime, you can go to http://www.codeplex.com/oxite to check it out. Of course, there are other blog engines up there, including blog engine .NET (which appears to be very highly supported and recommended by many folks), if you are in the market for some free blogging code.

Put up a REST API for Xbox Gamertag Data

Sun, 27 May 2007 07:37:00 GMT

My twitter app uses a web service hosted on my site to get all the necessary Xbox Live info.... way more than the twitter app actually uses. This is a SOAP API, located here:

http://duncanmackenzie.net/services/XboxInfo.asmx

I know that some people prefer a more RESTful API though, so I also have another 'page' that you can call with a straight GET request and just pass the gamertag in as a query string parameter:

http://duncanmackenzie.net/services/GetXboxInfo.aspx?GamerTag=Festive+Turkey

Enjoy!

Connect your Xbox 360 Gamertag to Twitter

Fri, 11 May 2007 17:58:00 GMT

UPDATE: I've updated this application since the original version, addressing most of the 'known issues' listed below

hey folks, the first version of my xbox to twitter app is done (at least done enough to share!) ...

Install the .NET Framework 2.0 (if you don't have it)
Install the app
Run it (from the "Duncan Mackenzie" folder in your Start Menu)
Right click the little 'twitter' icon on your notification area, pick Settings ... enter in your

Twitter Email Address
Twitter Screen Name
Twitter Password
Gamertag
check "Updates Enabled"
Click OK to save these settings...

Now fire up your Xbox 360 and updates will be sent to Twitter every few minutes (if you are online and your status has changed)
Come back here to post any feedback/problems!

Known Issues:

'status has changed' is a bit too sensitive now... if you are playing Crackdown and you go from running to driving then your status on Xbox Live actually changes (from "Running around" to "Driving around") and the app will post an update ... I'm planning to add an option to 'only post when the game changes, not the status'
Time delay, Xbox.com's data and my app are all using various forms of caching... so if you put in a game it may be 10-15 minutes before the app notices and posts an update ... also if you put one in, then stop playing a minute later... you may never see an update
The app checks status every 5 minutes, I can make that configurable in the future (but probably limited to no more often than 5 minutes... I'll let you make it less often though)
Format of the update: Currently it is "playing <game title> (<additional info>)" ... and if you are into config files and user specific isolated storage you can change that... I'll make it part of the settings in a future release.
You have to leave it running on a logged in machine to work... yep... I have a web based version but I thought people might be worried about giving me their userid/password for twitter so for now I thought I'd start with this local version.

Security concerns? Yes, you have to enter in your Twitter credentials. Those are stored in plain text on the hard drive... but it is on your hard drive only ... I never send your Twitter Credentials up to my site, although I do send them as credentials to Twitter when I call the Twitter APIs. Worried I might be sending to my site? Run a HTTP Trace if you'd like (Fiddler), you'll see calls to the Twitter API and calls to a web service on my site to get your gamertag info... nothing else.

Code Monkey by Jonathon Coulton

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 07:26:00 GMT

Ok, if you are a programmer... or even if you just can relate enough that you think Office Space is one of the best movies in the world (doesn't everyone?) then I need you to do this:

Go to http://www.jonathancoulton.com/songs
Scroll down to "Thing a Week III"
Click on the play button next to Code Monkey

Enjoy!

Jonathan works on the Popular Science podcast, does music for John Hodgman's Little Gray Books, and used to be a programmer (although I don't think you ever stop being a programmer, you just decide to do something else with most of your time)

Oh, and since I went there today... here is another selection from Jonathan's site: Ikea.mp3

And thanks to my great-grand-boss Steve (link is to his blog... last entry back in September of 2005... just so you know before you click on it and get all disappointed) for sending me this song tonight!

WPF/Avalon seems so easy, it might be time for me to try it out :)

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 20:13:00 GMT

I was browsing on www.xamlog.com and I found this tutorial on "Reflection using Visual Brush and Opacity Mask", which shows you how to produce this effect:

with very little code/markup.

Hmm... now that I finally have Vista up and running, it might be worth giving it a try.

Windows Live Writer

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 15:30:00 GMT

on10.net has a good interview up about the new blogging tool from the Windows Live team. What's cool about this app? For a developer, there is tons to be excited about, including a very easy to use SDK (wrote some plug-in code last night, super easy) and it ships with a bunch of .NET assemblies that I'm about to go spelunking through...

Learn a bit about how on10.net was made

Mon, 13 Mar 2006 17:11:00 GMT

Interview with the dev team (including me) is up on Channel 9

We are live...

Sun, 12 Mar 2006 18:05:00 GMT

the site is live that is... well, so are we... anyway... the real code for http://on10.net is up and running! We know about a few issues, but in general it is ready to rock, so feel free to shoot on over and grab your userid before all the good ones are gone :)

People who "View Source" are my kind of people...

Thu, 09 Mar 2006 21:11:00 GMT

It didn't take too long, people found Adam's little puzzle (Channel 9)

A couple more team members post details about our new project...

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 06:03:00 GMT

Adam Kinney, another member of our three-person dev team, posts our favorite comments about the preview site so far. Scoble, who really is on the same team as me... despite the fact that I've hardly ever seen him :)... also discusses what we have been up to.

My boss blogs a few hints about our upcoming release...

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 19:36:00 GMT

We've put up some fun short videos, but the real site is coming next week... which will be nice, I'll get to start talking about work on my blog again :)

Wow, BillG interviewed by Channel 9

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 15:17:00 GMT

Wow, I'm new to the team and I guess I've missed some of the C9 content over the past few years.... and, as the video description says "the second time we've had Bill on C9" so maybe this isn't as unusual as I think.... but this still really surprised me. I didn't expect to see an inteview with the man himself on there. Bill Gates sat down with Charles Torre and chatted about Mix06, Office and more... check it out here.

IE 7 Beta 2 Preview available for download

Tue, 31 Jan 2006 16:26:00 GMT

Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ to download it now, and check out the new IE7 video up on Channel 9!

Term Extraction

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 13:51:00 GMT

I was playing around with Yahoo's term extraction service, as a possible path to tagging (this is the same service used behind TagCloud.com, for example), and I created this C# class libary with a sample app written in Windows Forms.

Code is available for download here: Term Extraction (ZIP).

Interested in building your own Gadgets for Live.com?

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 05:46:00 GMT

Ok, so I must admit that the whole Live.com/Start.com thing looks so much like a "Digital Dashboard" (anyone else get into that fad when it was cool?) that I feel like I'm back working on building my own components into the Outlook Today page.... but cynicism aside, it is still a cool idea and the very open system for creating and adding your own gadgets rocks. If you are wondering how to get started, then check out Adam Kinney's article to learn exactly what you need to do.

More on that RSS editor...

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 05:28:00 GMT

In the end, MSDN didn't end up needing the RSS editor I wrote, so I've stripped out the features and content specific to their needs and started turning it into a more generic RSS creation tool. If you'd like to see it, as it is, you can run it from a ClickOnce install point here on my site. There are more features coming, and I'm revamping the style and behavior of the category system.... but you can try it out against copies of your own feeds or click File | New Feed to make new ones. Check out the Validate option on the menu, it will send whatever feed you have open to a web service enabled version of the feedvalidator.org system (coded up by Kent Sharkey), allowing you to check the validatity of your RSS without having to publish the file anywhere.

Note: If you have Beta 2 of the .NET Framework installed, the Click Once application will not install or run correctly. In this case, you need to run the VS remove tool (available from here)

Added Atom support to the FlairMaker... my version at least

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 05:19:00 GMT

Nick, from "The Coding Monkey" mentioned that he would like to see Atom support in the FlairMaker, so ... having no real reason not to, and having an extra 15 minutes after the kids went to sleep before I started cleaning up the house, I added it...

Of course, I've just added this to my forked version of Kent's original code... so any feature I add that he likes will need to manually added into his version... bad software development practice, but hey we're just playing around here so you should be expecting too much.

Update: I also modified the code to pull the blog's title from the feed (Atom or RSS) and stick it at the bottom. Not that useful of a feature for the Coding 4 Fun version, since it is always pointing at the same feed... but useful for mine if people want to use it for their own feeds

Following in Kent's footsteps, like usual :)

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 16:44:00 GMT

Kent's flair was cool... so I made my own, using his code of course, but targetting whatever feed you want... check out the source of this image and I'm sure you can figure out how to change the feed it is pointing to...

Are you wearing enough flair?

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 03:26:00 GMT

I've added Kent's flair to my site, just so I can be one of the cool kids in the class...

Little "Memory" game up on the MSDN Magazine site...

Sun, 02 Oct 2005 01:08:00 GMT

Check it out here...

New MSN Developer Center is live...

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 01:48:00 GMT

I've played around with coding against the Messenger APIs before, but it seems that MSN has really gone all out now and released a bunch of information for coding against their search, messenger, mapping services, and more... check it out on MSDN as of today!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msn/

A public site for collecting your exception info... like Dr. Watson via SOAP...

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 18:06:00 GMT

This is an interesting idea ... http://www.exceptioncollection.com/, something that I've pondered before...

I'd have to know more about it, in terms of the privacy and security of their data collection... before I could recommend it without any pause, but I would certainly take a look if you are building a widely distributed application (outside of a single company/enterprise), and I would probably try to integrate with the Exception handling/logging block from PAG.

The Spouse Acceptance Factor

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 14:28:00 GMT

I'm not sure who invented this term, SAF, but it comes up often around folks who are into new technology for the home... "sure you might want to install a media center pc, but have you taken into account the spouse acceptance factor?" or the more common, "having to restart the cable modem sure reduces the SAF". With everything new seems to come a few annoyances, so the question is whether or not the benefits outweigh the issues... and not in your opinion, but in the opinion of the rest of the people in your house. This is an ongoing issue for me, because I have a habit of picking up new gadgets for the home.

Update: So, it seems that SAF is just the politically correct form of WAF, which has been around for quite some time... at least the 70's according to this site: http://www.wordspy.com/words/wifeacceptancefactor.asp

First, I went out and picked up Tivo, back when we first moved down to the US (Tivo is not available in most of Canada)... which was accepted into the household with very few bumps. It took a little while to get used to it, my wife was asking me to schedule recordings for awhile, and it had some problems changing channels on the digital cable boxes (using IR blasters, which I am not a big fan of). Eventually we got to a point where I don't think we would ever want to go back to life without a Tivo-like solution.

Next, I brought in my own home-grown media center like box to play all our music. Generally well accepted, but with remote control issues (a tendency to take one button press to mean 3 or 4, therefore playing music you were just trying to browse through, scrolling way farther than intended, etc..). I was never really able to fix the remote issues, but I never spent any time trying (too much work to do for my real job to be debugging my hobby project for more than a few minutes), and the system became something that only I would use.

Eventually I replaced that music pc with a 'real' Media Center system running the first version of Windows Media Center, and tried to get people to use it instead of Tivo as well as for music/photos... well, it worked most of the time, but we had it stowed away in a cabinet and it would occasionally (way too often for our tastes) require the user to hit a keyboard or mouse button to get past some message box or dialog... which resulted in my wife just shutting it off and using the Tivo again. Along came the most recent version of Media Center (2005) and the SAF was greatly increased... no more dialogs require the keyboard ever appeared and it seemed easier to use for many reasons. Combined with a media center extender, which brings the whole system closer to the feel of a consumer appliance, and everything seems hunky dory... kinda...

For some reason, every once in awhile I get an error while watching a show... "Content Expired" and the screen is replaced with a big message about needed to re-acquire the content (this isn't some HBO content protection thing ... this happens on normal ABC/NBC type shows recorded the night before). Pressing stop, then play, fixes the problem, but every single time it happens I get to hear "Tivo never did this, you know" (partially just to bug me, I'm sure) ... and it happens a few times a week. Oh... and sometimes the media center extender just suddenly dies and says that it experienced 'a problem' ... and needs to be reset. There are a few other issues, making it seem unreliable... which means it is currently toeing the line between being loved and being thrown out... not sure what the resolution is going to be on that one.

The final piece of 'new tech' in my house is the Vonage voip phone system which works very well, except when the Internet is down. This isn't Vonage's problem but it is a dependency and for some reason my Comcast internet seems to die for at least a few hours every week... generally right when I'm at work and my wife finally has some time to call all the various doctors and friends to set up appointments, playdates, etc... sure, it comes back in a few hours, but by then my wife has tried the phone ten times, reset and power-cycled the cable modem, etc... and whenever that happens I get the request "can we please go back to regular phone service and Tivo? I don't need fancy features, but I need this stuff to work.... and work all the time!".

Yesterday the phone service stopped working for an hour, when my wife was trying to call the doctor about a problem that my son is having... and then today the media center extender stopped working (I think because I had VPN'd into microsoft the night before on the media center pc, and then disconnected... but I still think that is what ended up confusing the extender) ... leading my wife to compare all the new technology in our home to "being left alone with a pet that behaves itself when you are home, but then gets violent after you leave".

As a technology junkie, this is a difficult situation for me... so now I'm considering my options... should I go back to 'regular' phone service (cell phones don't work at my house, by the way... they start to die around a block from my place)? Should I get digital cable and a DVR from the cable company perhaps? Should I consider DirectTV and their DVR? Should I take advantage of the switch to get some form of HD service... only if I can get a HD DVR solution, of course...

hassle, hassle, hassle... and there are always so many choices (DirectTV vs. Cable for example) and you are generally giving something up with every choice...

Of course, this is all unimportant in the big scheme of things, but I often find it is these unimportant details that end up taking a large amount of your time ... whether you are talking about that little bug in your code that causes drag and drop to not work in 1% of the cases or the decision of what type of TV signal provider to go with...

Doing interesting things with XSL

Fri, 06 May 2005 14:12:00 GMT

I've been messing around with using XSL to display RSS on MSDN, as a simpler alternative to a custom ASP.NET control, and while it works perfectly in the core case (display all the items in a feed in a format), there are two additional requirements that were very easy to handle in a .NET class, but trickier (for me) in XSL.

Display the top n items
Out of the full list, display n randomly picked items

For the first, it was pretty easy... <xsl:if test="position < 6"> could be used to only output the top 5 items, for example... For the second though, I was stumped for a bit... then I came up with an idea. I would write a script function that would pick n items out of the total count, put those choices into an array, then use another function that tests the current position against that list of choices... sound good? Well, I'm still working on implementing this one... I have it working, but I'm not 100% sure of my solution.

If you are interested, you can see the code running here, and pull down the xsl from here, and the backing rss file from here. Code for the page ... Code for the control it references...

Added a VB 2005 version of that Divider Label control...

Fri, 22 Apr 2005 16:07:00 GMT

Ok, so the VB.NET 2003 version worked fine upgraded to 2005, with only one warning, but with the recent release of Beta 2, I thought I should jump on the bandwagon like everyone else :)

New .zip download linked from here

Coding4Fun, the site....

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 00:31:00 GMT

If you've been reading my blog for awhile, you probably know about my column "Coding4Fun", well now there is an entire site on MSDN going by that name... to be clear, this is not a site all about my column :) ... it is a site dedicated to the same concept though, hobbyist coding.

Check it out at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun

Update: way more details on the site available at Dan's blog...

Quick Windows Forms Control... a Label with a 3D Line...

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 14:00:00 GMT

I was mocking up a UI yesterday, and I wanted to produce an interface that looked like Front Page's "New from Template" dialog...

But I couldn't easily replicate those little dividers (for Options, Description, Preview), so I created a "DividerLabel" with about 10 minutes of VB.NET code (2003)...

And, if you are so inclined, you can set the text to nothing and you have a line!

The Code

 Imports System.Drawing Imports System.Windows.Forms Public Class DividerLabel Inherits System.Windows.Forms.Label Dim m_spacing As Integer Dim m_borderStyle As Border3DStyle = Border3DStyle.Etched <System.ComponentModel.Category("Appearance")> _ Public Property LineStyle() As Border3DStyle Get Return m_borderStyle End Get Set(ByVal Value As Border3DStyle) If Value <> m_borderStyle Then m_borderStyle = Value Me.Invalidate() End If End Set End Property <System.ComponentModel.Category("Appearance")> _ Public Property Spacing() As Integer Get Return m_spacing End Get Set(ByVal Value As Integer) If Value <> m_spacing Then m_spacing = Value Me.Invalidate() End If End Set End Property Protected Overrides Sub OnPaint(ByVal e As PaintEventArgs) Dim g As Graphics = e.Graphics Dim f As Font = Me.Font Dim b As Brush = New SolidBrush(Me.ForeColor) Dim sf As StringFormat = StringFormat.GenericTypographic Dim labelBounds As New RectangleF(0, 0, Me.Width, Me.Height) Dim textSize As SizeF = g.MeasureString(Me.Text, f, Me.Width) g.DrawString(Me.Text, f, b, 0, 0, sf) If textSize.Width + Spacing < Me.Width Then Dim startingPoint As Point startingPoint.X = textSize.Width + Spacing startingPoint.Y = textSize.Height \ 2 ControlPaint.DrawBorder3D(g, startingPoint.X, _ startingPoint.Y, _ Me.Width - startingPoint.X, _ 5, m_borderStyle, Border3DSide.Top) End If End Sub Public Sub New() Me.SetStyle(ControlStyles.DoubleBuffer, True) Me.SetStyle(ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint, True) Me.SetStyle(ControlStyles.ResizeRedraw, True) End Sub End Class

This is a first for me, some of my code has shipped with an official Microsoft product...

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 15:29:00 GMT

That may not seem like a big deal to most MIcrosoft developers, since most of them write code for that exact purpose, but I have spent most of my time in Redmond writing sample code and even with my switch to development I'm focused on writing internal systems that are not likely to ever be exposed outside of our own users. Recently, the Tablet PC folks released the "Experience Pack for Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005", which includes the Media Transfer application/power toy.

Getting started with Media Transfer
Easily copy photos, music, and videos from your desktop PC to your Tablet PC, even over your wireless network.

Well, behind the scences, that application uses my BITS code to handle its file transfers. This Visual Basic .NET library is really a wrapper around the BITS APIs, but it is a pretty major abstraction (adding OO concepts and .NET niceties like collections to what is really a flat Win32 style API) that makes it a lot easier to work with the BITS features.

I've seen a demo of the application itself, and the rest of that experience pack, and it looks amazing... but I wouldn't ask me for any more info about it, because I don't have a Tablet PC, so I can't even run it!

Cory Smith release new VB.NET game... Checkers Solitaire...

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 06:22:00 GMT

There is even an accompanying article. Oh, and a challenge:

The first person that can send me a history file that shows the gameplay getting to 1 piece left (with the default 8x8x2 game), I'll happily annouce it to the world (at least the readers of this site). Do you have what it takes? If you think you do; let the challenge begin. Even if you can get it down to less than 4, I'll be happy to mention your name as well.

Good luck!

Pulling from MSDN... the code...

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 05:26:00 GMT

(see this post for an introduction to this topic...)

I've wrapped my code up into a user control that you place anywhere on your page... it handles the load of data and then you can access its properties to output the html headers and body of the pulled content. I've just been using Output Caching on the host page, but if you decided to cache the body/headers that would certainly work as well...

Here is an example of using the control on a bare bones page...

<%@ Page Language="VB" Debug="true" %>
<%@ OutputCache Duration="360" VaryByParam="*" %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="dm" TagName="Pull" Src="Pull.ascx" %>
<dm:Pull id=pagePull runat="server" 
 QueryParam="pullURL" 
 DefaultURL="http://msdn.microsoft.com"/>
<html>
 <head>
 <%=pagePull.PageHeaders%>
 </head>
 <body>
 <%=pagePull.PageBody%>
 </body>
</html>

This simple page and the ascx are bundled up into a .zip file available here