I am a software
engineer by trade and in my spare time
(when I get any) I like to learn new
things and program. The reason I
like to program is because I love to
problem solve and think in abstractions.
Plus it is very satisfying to build
something and see it working.
Ideally I would love to go and do a PhD
and program and invent all day, sounds
like heaven. Below is some stuff I
have done in my spare time.
MD
Software License
All of my code
is released under the MD software
license - this states "You can do
anything you want with any of the code,
change it, re-use it, do whatever you
want with it, just give credit to me
whenever you do for the initial
work".
What's new
Unit testing - an article I wrote about my
thoughts on unit testing. Technologies
used are C# and NUnit.
I love C#, it is an
awesome language to program with,
check out some C# related items. The
try/catch/finally quiz is pretty fun for you
hardened coders out there.
Linux
Linux is an Open Source
operating system, one of a number of
alternatives to Microsoft Windows. I have
a section of my website dedicate to Linux based
projects, please follow
this link to see more.
Book List
I like to read technical
books to learn new technologies, I started
writing some basic comments down about the books
I read, maybe you might find them useful.
Click
here to read the list.
SVG -
Scalable Vector Graphics
SVG is a standard
for drawing Vector graphics, primarily on
the web. SVG is not just used for
displaying graphics, it also allows for user
interactions and animation. This is
done similarly to DHTML using JavaScript to
manipulate the SVG DOM. At work I
helped to create an editing tool using SVG.
The tool basically takes input from lighting
control hardware and updates an image to
allow a user to get real-time feedback from
their building lighting system.
I think that SVG is
a really cool technology, it is an
open specification, found
here.
The main player is Adobe with their
SVG
viewer which is really the defacto
standard in viewers, although Mozilla is
also capable of
rendering SVG natively. Although I
really like this technology I do not think
it is really ready for the mainstream, the
reason I say this is because it does not
have any widgets, like scrollbars, drop
downs, checkboxes etc. So building a
user interface is tedious, when you compare
this to things such as
Flash,
Flex and the
awesome upcoming
XAML from Microsoft it has
a long way to catch up.
If you are
interested in learning more, here are some
useful links:
Adobe SVG
Zone - this will get you started and you
can download their SVG viewer
KevLinDev
- excellent place for beginners tutorials
Yahoo SVG Group - plenty of SVG people
here to answer any questions you have.
Good SVG Book - explains all you need to
know. I have a copy myself and have
found it very useful.
SVG
Whiteboard
SVG whiteboard is a
little app I created to let people draw to
each other using SVG over the internet. It is pretty
simple to do using SVG and a few lines of
ASP.Net to act as a server. The basic
premise is that every time a user draws on
one board, the SVG posts the newly drawn
data to the server which stores it in a
buffer. Each board continually polls
the server to see if there is any new data
to retrieve, if there is then it is
collected and appended into the SVG DOM.
The networking inside the SVG uses the
postURL method to send data to the server
and getURL to retrieve the data. Once
the data is received it is turned into an
XML Document Fragment using the parseXML
method so that it can be appended inside the
SVG DOM.
It is just a demo
application, so only two people can use it
at any time (the JavaScript code is written
to accommodate unlimited users, but this
webpage has hard coded user ids). To
run, one person clicks on the
Whiteboard1 link below, the other on the
Whiteboard2 link. Then drawing on
either board will be shown on the other
users board. Feel free to look at the
code, but if you use it or modify it, please give credit
to me.
THE CODE -
(you will probably have to right click and
download the files, in order to be able to
view them, depending on your browser
settings):
clsWhiteBoard.js
-> contains functionality for handling
user input.
clsDataSyncroniser.js
-> handles sending and receiving data
from the SVG to the server.
clsEnumNamespaces.js
-> stores all of the different namespaces
used in the applications.
WhiteBoard.svg
-> creates the SVG whiteboard area, and
loads the JavaScript files specified above.
newdrawing.aspx,
newdrawing.aspx.cs,
newdrawing.aspx.resx
-> very simple data store to facilitate
data transfer between different whiteboard
instances (you obviously will need IIS
capable or running ASP.Net to run these
files, plus remove the .download postfix to
the end of the file name, I added this so
that the files could be downloaded)
SVG Gaming
Framework
I got a little bit
bored one night and decided that I would try
to make a game using SVG. After I
started thinking about this I decided that
it would be friendlier to make a framework
for gaming in SVG that other people could
use and build on to make their own games.
So the following code has some simple
constructs, sprites, collision detection,
animation and user input handling, all
of the basic requirements for a game.
Using the code you can quickly and easily
make new games, so please go ahead and try
to make your own games using this
framework.
There is an example
game below called "Catch the
Astronaut", which was build using this
framework, I was able to code it
extremely quickly, thanks to all of the main
framework in the files below:
clsAnimationEngine.js
-> handles animating all of the
sprites around the canvas. It is
possible to modify the frame rate of the
animation to suit your needs.
clsCanvas.js
-> handles all of the user input events,
plus has reference to all of the other major
items such as the animation engine etc.
You just need to inherit from this file when
you create your own game.
clsLayer.js ->
represents a layer to which sprites can be
added or removed. This allows sprites
to be placed infront or behind each other,
plus it also allows you to hide groups of
sprites with a single command.
clsNamespaces.js
-> class that holds all of the namespaces
used in the framework. You can add
your own namespaces to this file.
clsSprite.js
-> The sprite class contains methods for
displaying images and shapes, as well as
applying transformations.
clsStatusBar.js
-> a bar that normally appears at the top
of the gaming area. This allows you to
put things like current score and number of
remaining lives etc for users to see.
clsVertex2D.js ->
A vector class used to help with collision
detection.
SVGGamingEngine.zip - contains all of the files
above in one zip file for easy download.
Again feel free to
use any of this code in your own apps, but
don't forget to give credit to me.
Catch The
Astronaut
Catch The Astronaut -
this is a game I created using the SVG game
framework from above. It probably took me 2
or 3 hours to make using the framework
above. The aim of the
game is to dodge the shooting stars whilst
trying to save as many astronauts as you
can. You get more points the faster
you go and the more astronauts you pick up.
Controls
Up Arrow - move
forward, the more you hold this down the
faster you will go.
Down Arrow - slow
down, the more you hold it down, the more
you slow down.
Left, Right Arrow -
turn left and right
It is important that
you click on the game area with the mouse
and leave the mouse inside the game area,
otherwise the controls will not work because
the SVG viewer will not receive any keyboard
events.
Click
here to play, make sure you have read
the above paragraph. This game runs
very smoothly on my computer (2.53Ghz
Pentium 4), if it is slow and jerky, you can
change the frame rate, by changing the value
of the this.m_intFrameRate variable in the
clsAstronautCanvas.js file.
Here are the files
which are built on top of the Game
Framework:
clsAsteroidSprite.js -> inherits from
clsSprite. The is the asteroid you
should avoid in the game.
clsAstronautSprite.js -> inherits from
clsSprite. The astronaut that you need
to try and catch.
clsAstronautCanvas.js -> inherits from
clsCanvas. Loads all of the sprites
and handles the user input.
Astronaut.zip -> contains all the files
required to play the game.
C# Chat Client and
Server (Instant Messaging)
The following code
allows you to create a chat server then have
multiple clients connect and talk to each
other like Instant Messaging. The
application was written in C# using
Remoting, which is a very powerful easy to
use way of communicating data across
application domains. The code can be
downloaded from below. The main reason
I wrote this was because some of the people
I worked with wanted a way to quickly talk
to each other at work, but IM is not allowed
where I work. So we decided to create
our own simple Instant Messaging framework.
I didn't include
much of a GUI with this because my main goal
was to create the backend networking
part. Creating a GUI to this framework
is simple and easy and you can just plug the
backend code right into anything you create.
The files you need
are listed below:
RemotingServerClient.zip -> The Client
and Server class library. This library
will allow you to connect remotely over the
internet (you may have issues with
firewalls).
MessagingServer.zip -> A GUI for the
server, to allow you to start / stop and
choose ports for the server.
MessagingClient.zip -> A very basic
client front end - you might want to write
your own, this one will not win any prizes,
I just created it for testing the backend
code.
.NET
Compact Framework GDI+ Extension
A friend and I had the
idea of creating an SVG viewer for the .NET
Compact framework. After initially
looking into the framework, it can be seen
that it is quite limited when it comes to
graphics. No paths, or transformations
i.e. rotation, scaling and translation.
So I set about creating a library for the
.NET compact framework that would easily let
you do these things. The code will be
posted soon, I just have to tidy up the
comments a bit first.
