Microsoft sent me a free pen drive today, and so I like Microsoft. I am such a free stuff whore. They send me other stuff occasionally, and discounting the countless CDs and DVDs of beta software I have to say that I appreciated the nicely printed thank you note from one beta program the most (although it was a mass printed thank you note, which is nothing like the hand signed Christmas card I once got from my preferred DVD website, which I can only assume was because I buy far too many DVDs). The TShirt I got from the...

My job is strange. This week I have to write a couple of DirectShow filters, a device driver and review lots of C# code. Beat that for a varied workload. I don't think I could go back to doing the same thing every day any more. I can't imagine what spending 18 months writing something like a word processor must be like. How do people stay sane? Anyway, technical commentary time. I've been learning DirectShow for the last few weeks and I have to say it's interesting to say the least. I've actually ditched real video processing applications for some tasks in favour of...

I've been doing a bit of work on the performance of C# and how it compares to C++ and so I'm looking at Managed DirectX as a good platform for doing comparisons. One of the first things I did was attack the DX assemblies with Reflector so that I could see how they were implemented and this threw up the first potential problem, ensuring that I'm comparing like with like. Consider the code for Vector3.Normalize() public void Normalize(){ volatile pinned ref Vector3 local1 = this;.D3DXVec3Normalize(local1, local1);} The first thing you notice is that it calls through to the D3DX library, which is of...

I'll chime in too: I want to start a blog petition. I want everyone who agrees with me to blog the following sentence: Unit Testing support should be included with all versions of Visual Studio 2005 and not just with Team System. Please link or trackback to this post so I can keep track of how well this works. Thanks [Geek Noise] Microsoft don't seem to get what unit testing is about, and they're just going with a more traditional usage model. How this can be when you have James Newkirk working for you is another...

Here's an interesting post I came across about quicktime support in Media Player. Want to use Windows Media Player to watch QuickTime movies without the Apple player (which I find has a poor user interface, and non standard windows controls)? http://www.free-codecs.com/download/QuickTime_Alternative.htm The best part is that it includes a DirectShow filter. This means that any application on Windows that supports DirectShow (Windows Media Player, Media Center) can just play .mov files. Sweet! The posts on this weblog are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confer no rights. The opinions expressed herein are my own personal...

I was grubbing around on my hard disk just now and I noticed the telltale directory structure of de-DE, fr-FR and the like that .NET uses for globalisation. The funny thing was that it was part of a game, Firewarrior, and so I dug a little deeper and it turns out that it uses .NET for the config application. The actual game isn't .NET though, but I've not seen anybody mention this application as a mainstream app that uses .NET.

Games programming is something I return to every year or so because I'm in the other industry (embedded programming) that needs you to actually understand what's going on when you write really fast code and the research I'm doing at the moment in order to get demos ready for our stand at Farnborough this year means I'm spending most of my time looking at what games programmers are doing to help do what I need to (it's strange the amount of shared requirements that military aircraft and games have). One of the results from this is that I'm reading books such as...

I hate gardening. Mowing lawns is the bane of my life and I have a respect for weeds and the way they can grow where my plans can't. In fact the only plants I actually pay attention to are my Cacti because if I forget about them for a year or so they're still alive when I remember they exist. Although my hand was turned into a pincushion because of one of them earlier so maybe I don't like them that much. I do care about nature though, and the fish in my pond get their filter cleaned daily (it clogs...

This week I've been working on video playback for part of our analysis tools and so have been looking at how to play back video using C#. As usual with C# trying to do the simplest things is overly complicated and it took a full 1 line of code to play the video. Two if you want the playback window to be a child window on your form. The code to load the file and start it playing in a child control on your form is as follows:using Microsoft.DirectX.AudioVideoPlayback; ... Video video = Video.FromFile(fileName, true); video.Owner = panel1; The class is part of Managed DirectX and will...

Yesterday (by half an hour or so where I am) David Bowie past the 40 years of recording milestone. His last couple of albums have been totally back on form after the 80's, or his "Phil Collins Period" as he puts it. And his 90's Indy and Drum and Bass excursions were slightly dodgy too. The last two albums have been great though. When's the next one?