BASeCamp Programming Blog

Sometimes you need to create temporary files. Usually, you can discard those temporary files by opening them in a fashion so they are deleted when they are closed. However, in some cases, you are dealing with a library or other class that is very picky about what you give it. Other times, you create an entire directory and want that directory to be deleted when you application is closed.

Whatever the case, there are several approaches to this. The first and most obvious (to me) was to try to use C#/.NET’s Disposable interface pattern. By creating a static List of those objects, we can ensure their Dispose()/Finalizers are run when the application is terminated (static variables and fields are disposed when the application is being torn down). Then the logic to delete and attempt to delete the file can be placed in the Dispose() method as needed. My implementation originally encountered problems with sharing violations- since the application, early on, may have many handles open. Primarily, this likely occurs because of the non-deterministic nature of how static objects are disposed; so if a File is opened and is in another static member, it might not have been disposed when our dispose method is called. As a result I’ve added a Delayed invoke method which, if the delete fails initially, will call itself again after a second (trying up to five times).

This implementation also gives up after a few tries and then tries to schedule the file for reboot deletion. I considered a rather insane mechanic whereby the class would store a data file in the Temporary folder, then when first constructed (eg. static constructor) it can check for that file and either create and dispose a DeletionHelper for each filename stored in that data file, or add those files to the existing list for deletion when the application terminates. However, after considering it I figured such a feature might make things more complicated than necessary.

The other idea for automatic deletion would be to use the CreateFile() API with full share permissions, and pass the FILE_FLAG_DELETE_ON_CLOSE flag to it, then close that file in the Dispose method. Here is one possible implementation:

And so, that gives us two implementations. I currently use the first in BASeBlock for deleting the temporary files and folders that are sometimes created during start-up, particularly if it finds a Zip file (which may have additional content that it checks for). Since those extracted files may be used during the run, I use the class to make sure they are deleted when the Application exits; or at least make an effort to do so.

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XNA Game Studio is a finicky bugger, and it’s even more finicky now that it is no longer being maintained. One of the biggest issues is that it doesn’t work properly with the latest version of Visual Studio, 2012. However, you can cajole it and reassure it that things will be OK.

One way to do so is to essentially “translate” an existing, working install, and “hack” it’s configuration so that it works in Visual Studio 2012. In order to get the appropriate file setup, you will have to install XNA Game Studio 4 into Visual Studio 2010.

With Visual Studio 2010 Installed and XNA Game Studio happily installed, you can force the XNA 4 installation to get along with Visual Studio 2012. XNA Game Studio installs by default in

%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\XNA Game Studio 4.0

the first step in whipping it into shape is to simply copy that folder to the appropriate target location in the Visual Studio 2012 installation. This is located, by default:

%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\XNA Game Studio 4.0

Not done yet, though- it’s copied over, and VS2012 will try to run it, but it will look inside the plugin manifest, see that it doesn’t say it works with VS2012, and then explode (well, it doesn’t explode, it just doesn’t load the extension, but that’s hardly very exciting.) In order to do so, you will need to open and edit the extension.vsixmanifest file within the XNA Game Studio folder you copied (the new one, that is). You’ll notice this:

What you can do should be pretty clear now; just flooble ¹ the “Version=”10.0″ entry to point to version 11. Save the file, Open Visual Studio 2012, and BAM! Game Studio projects should now be available via the New Project Dialog Templates.

It still doesn’t work

Sometimes- perhaps You’ve been badmouthing Visual Studio behind it’s back; Maybe you complained under your breath about how slow Visual Studio 2012 is when you went to deal with Intellisense. Maybe you told Visual Studio 2012 where it can shove it when it provided you with a helpful popup tip. Visual Studio 2012 has feelings and, like a Cat, never forgets it’s enemies.

On the other hand, you might just need to delete the extensions cache file. The extensions cache file can be found at “%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\Extensions”; specifically, the “extensionSdks.en-US.cache” and “extensions.en-US.cache” files in that folder. Delete them with impunity and regret nothing. Visual Studio 2012 has forced your hand. Innocent Files must die so that Game Studio 4.0 may live.

¹ flooble is a word I just invented now. Patent Pending!

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I’ve already covered this topic from the perspective of why C# is better than Java, In my opinion. This time, I’ll go over the differences as even-handed as possible. This has come about primarily because I’ve been working extensively in Java, and find there are features that I like and dislike in both languages. Though I will admit I lean heavily towards C#.

First, how about a little history on them?

Java

Most, if not all, Languages and platforms have a varied and sometimes tumultuous history. The Java language and platform is definitely no exception. In it’s earliest incarnations, Oak, the purpose behind Java was to provide a platform and language to automate appliances. This is not really as far-fetched as it would seem, since most appliances do run some sort of software. If you pick a toaster off a shelf at random you have a good chance of getting something that runs some sort of executable code. The purpose was, presumably, to make this behaviour something that could be patched and changed more easily by end-users; much like how many car owners who are versed in technology will sometimes change the internal firmware to eke out better performance, one could see a person customizing their coffee maker or kettle for specific purposes.

The language, however, proved too useful for such a niche market, and eventually found it’s way onto the PC platform. It was initially met with some rather exorbinant and out of proportion enthusiasm, as Java was cited as the be all end all of all things on the web. Needless to say, that did not come to pass. Java- the language and technology- have now settled into being used for server-side development and the development of applications and games, instead. A purpose for which it is well suited, for the most part.

C#

There are some proponents- who not surprisingly are strongly biassed towards Java technologies- that claim that C# and .NET are a poor attempt by Microsoft to attempt to replicate Java. This is a rather ill-thought claim. While there is some interesting history behind C#, since it appeared relatively shortly after Sub Microsystems revoked Microsoft’s Java License, it’s very likely it was already in development anyway. Even if we go with that assumption and consider that C# is in fact Microsoft’s Java baby, it has still found itself in a very similar- but different- market.

Design Differences

One of my overriding dislikes of the Java language is mostly in the design strategy, which typically avoids the addition of language features if they can be misused. For this reason, Java does not have Operator overloading, Properties, and various similar features, under the guise that it’s easy to misuse them. In a similar vein, it lacks the ability for the programmer to create their own value types, while at the same time presenting somewhat confusing exposures for it’s own primitive types.

Java is a language designed essentially in tandem with it’s bytecode. Java source is compiled into Java Bytecode; this bytecode is an intermediate executable code that is run by a Java Virtual Machine; the Java Virtual Machine emulates a “stack-based” CPU.

C# is also designed in tandem with the CLR, it’s execution environment, but the CLR is designed with the capabilities of other languages in mind. For example, While Java uses every single feature of the Java Bytecode for Java features, C# does not actually exploit all features of the CLR and the IL bytecode that the language compiles to. What makes this interesting is that while all Java bytecode can be “decompiled” to some equivalent Java source, not all IL code can be decompiled to C#. For example, Visual Basic .NET uses a few features of the CLR that are not used in C#, such as Exception filters.

Generics

Generics are one feature that is implemented quite differently between each language. The Java approach is to make the feature something that is dealt with before the Virtual Machine runs it. What this essentially means is that, when compiling a generic class, the Java Compiler replaces all type parameters with their type restrictions (the Java docs call them “bounds”). If the type parameter is unrestricted/unbounded, then the compiler will use the Object type. The compiler will insert type casts where necessary to preserve type safety (which includes both code within the generic class as well as code that utilizes the generic class) and generate appropriate “bridge” methods between a generic base class and a class that extends from it.

C#- thanks to the CLR- has full-on support for Generic types. The ramifications for this go both ways. Whereas the Java method of Type Erasure allows your program to work successfully on older Virtual Machines as well as newer ones (because the VM is not changed) you lose out on the ability to use generics through reflection. C#, on the other hand, allows you to create a new Type based on a generic type and the types of it’s parameters, and then instantiate the applicable classes as desired. Reflection is extremely powerful in both Java and C#, but this particular ability can be very appealing for some designs. On the flip-side, however, in order to use Generics in C#, the code needs to be running on the Version 2 CLR; in fact if you compile for a later version of the CLR, the resulting compilation will not work on earlier versions. This is because the CLR development mantra is to work to add improvements to the system as a whole, while allowing legacy code to run without recompilation by allowing side by side installation.

One interesting way to compare the two platforms is with a direct demonstration and comparison of otherwise functionally equivalent segments of code. Now on e might think I would turn to the Java and C# implementations as part of my ongoing Anagrams Series , but since we will be looking at the IL and Bytecode of each, it might be ideal to go for brevity. I’ve settled on a simple program that uses a Generic structure to store 100 values, and then write them out. Here is the Java implementation:

Something of note is that we need to use List rather than List because generic type parameters must be class types. This is sort of a side-effect of the way Type Erasure was implemented, since it essentially inserts appropriate casts to the proper type when the Type parameter is used. the Integer type is a boxing class that is provided by the Java Class Library, and for which the compiler has special considerations for (like the other boxing classes). The disassembled Java bytecode from this is shown below. This is from the main method, and I stripped out the extra stuff about the methods and whatnot.

Edit: Fixed the markup issue. you would think the &ltpre&gt tag would prevent other tags from being identified within, but apparently WordPress still helpfully tries to auto-complete tags when you save a post...
Some take-aways from this. We can see Type Erasure in action starting at the first invokespecial line, which invokes the constructor. The constructor is of java.util.ArrayList. But this lacks any Generic context. As we can see in the future calls, many of the references to and from the List are cast to an Object when being passed and cast to an Integer when being retrieved. This shows Type Erasure in action.

Moving on to C#:

This one is a lot shorter than the Java version because I've used as many language and framework features as I thought I could get away with. To say the resulting IL dissassembly was verbose in comparison would be an understatement:

A lot of the verbosity here is due to the explicit referencing of various framework types. it’s also interesting that the resulting IL has an Exception Handler which is most likely attached through scope. That is, scoping braces in blocks will cause any declared variables within to be deconstructed as necessary. This doesn’t run measurably slower than the Java version. Fundamentally, while this IL looks longer (and a reasonable assumption to base on that would be that it’s slower) it’s also just a representation of the internal IL code. Additionally, the CLR has a very powerful JITter that will compile segments of code on the fly to Machine language, which is particularly helpful for looping constructs, or really any code that repeats more than once.

In order to better flesh out differences as I encounter them or learn enough about them, I’ve decided this will be something I shall repeat- a series, if you will. Expect more blog posts on the subject of C# and Java differences. If necessary consider this post a primer and look at their run-times.

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C#’s linq(language-integrated query) features are some of the more powerful features available through the language. Aside from it’s query operators that are, as it’s name would suggest, integrated into the language, the feature also brings along a large set of Extension methods to the IEnumerable interface type.

One interesting re-use of the IEnumerable type for extension methods is to create ad-hoc language structures using it, for example:

What we have here is similar- but not quite the same- as a switch statement within a loop. What makes this particularly interesting as a structure is that it acts sort of like a seive. The source to the extension EachCase() method is shown here:

The function works by calling the passed Action for all entries in the enumeration that cause TestExpression to return true. Those that return false are yielded to the caller. In the original code the EachCase() calls were chained, one after the other; each one operated on the entries that the previous one didn’t work with. the final .Count() call in the original code is to force it to be enumerated, allowing all the code blocks to evaluate appropriately. What use-cases might this have? I have no idea. However I feel confident in saying that it could make for a more readable alternative to something that might otherwise require a separate Finite-State machine.

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Most application frameworks/languages provide access to the Command Line parameters passed to your application. Generally it is passed to your application as either a string or an array of strings. What you do not get automatically is the functionality to parse out switches.

Command-line parameters used to be the only way to communicate with a program. Fundamentally, the command line was your UI into the program. Different platforms took different approaches. Unix-like systems typically take the “invasive” route; they replace wildcards and then pass the resulting command line to the application. This means that you don’t have to do any shell expansion of wildcards (as it is known) but you have to account for the fact that your command line could include a lot of files. It’s a trade-off, really. Either way, I figured for the purposes of this library, we could stick to the platform- if the program is run with a wildcard, you’ll see the wildcard on windows, but it will have been expanded if you run the same program on Linux. It might be worth adding an option to “auto-expand” wildcards- just for consistencies sake, but that seems like a post for another day.

Either way, most applications also include flags and switches. This is more a De Facto standard that has cropped up- there is no hard and fast rulebook about what flags and switches are or how you are supposed to pass arguments, which can cause no end of confusion when it comes to reading application documentation. the .NET language just gives you the string, and leaves it up to you to decide how to interpret it. Some language libraries provide functionality to parse the Command Line appropriately, such as Python. C# doesn’t come with such a class…. So let’s make one!

First we need to determine what exactly can exist in a command line. My method allows for two things: Switches, and arguments. A Switch can include an argument, separated from the switch with a colon. For example:

In this case, we have three switches- switch, sw, and doall. The first two include an argument. My “syntax” allows for quotes in the arguments of switches as well as the “loose” arguments. We will evidently need classes to represent and parse Arguments, and another one for Switches. The parsing can be done sequentially. Although it’s not a recommended best practice, I chose to use by reference parameters in the class constructors. In order to keep things generic and accessible, both Switches and Arguments will derive from a CommandLineElement abstract class, which will force each base class to implement toString(). the ArgumentItem class will be used for parsing both “loose” arguments, as well as arguments found after a switch.

Arguments

Arguments are simple- if the first letter of the position is a quote, we look for the next quote that isn’t doubled up. Otherwise, we look for either the next whitespace or the end of the string. Each argument only needs the actual argument value.

The constructor is where the important stuff happens. the by reference parameter is used to define the starting position, and we update it when the constructor returns to point at the character after the argument. The class also defines some statics for implicit conversions to and from a string.

Now that we have the Argument class, we can define the Switch class. The actual syntax of switches often depends on the application but also seems to depend on the platform. for example, Linux tools favour the hyphen for single letter flags, and double hyphens for multi-character flags. Switches are also called flags. forward slash is not generally used as a switch or flag indicator. Windows platforms prefer the forward slash but generally allow for single hyphens as well. We aim to support all three syntaxes, and make the client application not have to worry about which it is. We also add support for arguments- a switch can be specific as such:

 
someprogram /d:argument.exe
 

The element after the colon will be parsed as an argument and attached to the switch itself. But enough waffling- on to the Switch:

With the basic parsing logic completed, we need to consider how we want this to be used. Best way is to think of how we would like to use them:

Some basic take-aways from this. First, the Core Parser Object needs to provide an Indexer. In the above example, we see it is accessing Switches by passing in the Switch name. Other possibilities include using direct numeric indexes to refer to any argument- much like you would access elements in the framework provided args [] String array. Another possibility is to have the Argument of a switch auto-populate, rather than be null, when accessed:

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Is XNA Going Away?

The following consists of my opinion and does not constitute the passing on of an official statement from Microsoft. All thoughts and logic is purely my own and I do not have any more ‘insider’ information in this particular topic than anybody else

I’ve been hearing from the community a bit of noise about Microsoft’s XNA Framework- a Programming library and suite of applications designed to ease the creation of Games- being cut. A google reveals a lot of information, but a lot of it is just plain old rumours. The only one I could find that was based on actual information still makes a lot of assumptions. It is based on this E-mail:

Our goal is to provide you the best experience during your award year and when engaging with our product groups. The purpose of the communication is to share information regarding the retirement of XNA/DirectX as a Technical Expertise.

The XNA/DirectX expertise was created to recognize community leaders who focused on XNA Game Studio and/or DirectX development. Presently the XNA Game Studio is not in active development and DirectX is no longer evolving as a technology. Given the status within each technology, further value and engagement cannot be offered to the MVP community. As a result, effective April 1, 2014 XNA/DirectX will be fully retired from the MVP Award Program.

Because we continue to value the high level of technical contributions you continue to make to your technical community, we want to work with you to try to find a more alternate expertise area. You may remain in this award expertise until your award end date or request to change your expertise to the most appropriate alternative providing current contributions match to the desired expertise criteria. Please let me know what other products or technologies you feel your contributions align to and I will review those contributions for consideration in that new expertise area prior to the XNA/DirectX retirement date.

Please note: If an expertise change is made prior to your award end date, review for renewal of the MVP Award will be based on contributions in your new expertise.

Please contact me if you have any questions regarding this change.

This is an E-Mail that was sent out- presumably- to XNA/DirectX MVPs. I say presumably because for all we know it was made up to create a news story. If it was sent out, I never received it, so I assume it would have been sent to those that received an MVP Award with that expertise. It might have been posted to an XNA newsgroup as well. Anyway, the article that had this E-mail emblazoned as “proof” that MS was abandoning XNA seemed to miss the ever-important point that it actually says nothing about XNA itself, but actually refers to the dropping of XNA/DirectX as a technical Expertise. What this means is that there will no longer be Awards given for XNA/DirectX development. It says nothing beyond that. Now, it could mean they plan to phase it out entirely- but to come to that conclusion based on this is a bit premature, because most such expertise-drops actually involved a merge. For example, in many ways, an XNA/DirectX expertise is a bit redundant, since XNA/DirectX works using a .NET Language such as VB.NET and C# and very few XNA/DirectX MVPs truly can work with XNA in any language at all, it might make sense to just clump them with us lowly Visual C# and Visual Basic MVPs.

To make the assumption that XNA is being dropped based on this E-mail is a bit premature. In my opinion, I think the choice was made for several reasons. I guess some of the misconceptions might be the result of misconceptions about just what a Microsoft MVP is. First, as I mentioned before, a lot of the expertise of XNA/DirectX involves an understanding- and expertise- in some other area. Again, Visual C#, Visual Basic, Visual C++, etc. So in some ways they might have considered a separate XNA/DirectX expertise redundant. Another reason might have to do with the purpose of an MVP. MVP Awards are given to recognize those who make exceptional community contributions in the communities that form around their expertise. For example, my own blog typically centers around C#, solving problems with C# and Visual Studio, and presents those code solutions and analyses to the greater community by way of the internet, as well as sharing my knowledge of C# and .NET in those forums in which I participate. MVP awardees don’t generally receive much extra inside information- and that they do get is typically covered by a NDA agreement. The purpose of the award is to also establish good community members with which Microsoft can provide information to the community. MVPs are encouraged to attend numerous events where they can, quite literally, talk directly to the developers of the Products with which they acquainted. in some way you could consider MVPs “representatives” of the community, who are chosen because their contributions mean they likely have a good understanding of any prevalent problems with the technologies in question, and interacting with MVPs can give the product teams insight into the community for which their product is created. Back to the particulars here, however- as the E-mail states, XNA Game Studio is not under active development. Now, following that, it seems reasonable to work with the assumption that either that product has no Product Team, or those that are on that Product Team are currently occupied in other endeavours, or other products for which their specific talents are required.

It’s not so much that they are “pulling the plug in XNA”- the product is currently in stasis. As a direct result of this, it makes sense that without an active Product Team, having specific MVP Awardees for that expertise isn’t particularly useful for either side- MVPs gain from personal interactions with the appropriate Microsoft Product team as well as fellow MVPs, and Microsoft gains from the aggregate “pulse of the community” that those MVPs can provide. Without a Product Team for a expertise, that expertise is redundant, because there is nobody to get direct feedback. This doesn’t mean the XNA community is going away, just that, for the Moment, there is no reason for Microsoft to watch it’s pulse, because the product is “in stasis” as the OS and other concerns surrounding the technology metamorphize and stabilize (The Windows 8 UI style, Windows Store, and other concerns in particular). Once the details and current problems with those technologies are sussed out, I feel they will most certainly look back and see how they can bring the wealth of game software written in XNA to the new platform. Even if that doesn’t happen, XNA is still heavily used for XBox development- which is also it’s own expertise.

I hope this helps clear up some of the confusion that has been surrounding XNA. It doesn’t exactly eliminate uncertainty- this could, in fact, be a precursor to cutting the technology altogether. But there is nothing to point to that being the direction, either.

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Randomization is something that is pretty much a staple in games. But the tricky part is randomizing in an expected way.

Some kinds of randomization, you don’t want to be truly random- just mostly random- and you do in fact want it to go through all the possibilities more frequently, though in a random way.

The best example I can think up is to imagine you have a Enemy that can shoot forwards, backwards, up, and down. Now, targeting the player notwithstanding, let’s assume you want them to shoot randomly. If you go with the approach of just choosing a direction completely at random, you will find that the code will often choose the same direction many times in a row. This is more or less the problem with trying to randomize small sets of data. Each selected element is more or less chosen without regard to those chosen before. This fits probability, of course, but can be a bit weird gameplay wise.

Enter ItemBucket

The solution is fundamentally to make sure that items are chosen at random, but also that every item get’s used. The best solution I could think of was one where you choose elements at random, but you make sure you don’t choose the same elements twice during any one run. The class I created for this purpose I called “CItemBucket”. It’s functionality is fairly simple: it is constructed with the items it will contain. This initializes two lists with those elements. The ItemBucket can “dispense” items; when an item is dispensed, it is removed from the list. if the list is empty, it is reset from the Original List. this makes sure that in any number of elements of size N, any element in that list will occur exactly once during N dispenses. My original idea was to return a randomly indexed element each call, but then I got to thinking that, in many ways, we are simply dealing with a “shuffled deck” of elements, and returning items from that “deck”. So, at the cost of making Adding a bit more expensive, I think I was able to make the retrieval method O(n) for the number of present elements (based on the Queue implementation, that is).

Here, the, is the C# Implementation for this class:

Here is some code that consumes this implementation:

Works quite well, as far as I can tell.

But wait, there’s more!

Perhaps because I like to think of myself as something of a polyglot, let’s go ahead and come up with an implementation of this for Java. Now, doing this in Java would be a bit more tricky- that is, directly. Unlike the C# implementation, we don’t have the convenience of lambda’s to make a ‘pure’ shuffle. Instead, we would have to write our own implementation. Instead of that, I went with the original concept- that is, to choose,remove, and return a random index, and re-create the Bucket contents when we’ve emptied it. Here is the Java version of this class:

Test code for the above Java implementation:

As far as I’m concerned, the most interesting thing in the Java implementation is the “RepeatArray” method. Java’s Generic limitations prevent us from creating Arrays of the Generic Type Parameter directly, so instead we need to use some reflection magic. unfortunately, as far as I can tell there is no way to get the class of the actual type parameter in Java, so I had to resort to accepting that class as a parameter. Also, because of the lack of Generators/Enumerable methods, I ended up simply having that method return a List of the generic type, rather than an Enumerable.

It’s not over yet!

You might think, “OK, he’s covered C# and Java implementations- can I please go home. Well, yes, you can. But then you’ll miss my Python implementation! I went with the same approach I chose for Java- that is, retrieving items randomly and removing them. It’s fully possible to use the same methodology I used for the C# approach- using Queues and sorting on randomized keys- but I found this approach a bit less verbose, and more straightforward. And, it is my opinion that ‘straightforward’ is sort of the “python way”, so I went with that.

And, of course, the Python code that uses it:

The first thing that stands out is just how much shorter this one is to either the Java or C# implementations. This is probably mostly due to the dynamic typing of Python, as well as a few syntactic shortcuts. The only “gotcha” I found was that Python didn’t really support overloaded methods. Technically, I could create one method and then verify what parameters were actually passed, but in this case I wanted one to be a Generator Method, and the other to simply return a single element. Only way I could figure out how to do that was to have separate DispenseSingle() and DispenseMulti() methods. It also doesn’t expose the innards like the other implementations, in that you cannot add Elements to an already constructed instance. In retrospect, I’m not really sure if it’s a good idea to make the design Mutable at all. The Most typical use-case would be to construct it with all the elements it will use, and not change it afterwards- that’s the use case I have in BASeBlock, and the use-case I’m considering using my Java implementation for. So having extra methods to add elements, and keep fields “fresh” and consistent adds implementation complexity for little gain.

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One common problem that comes up in the creation of stylized windows such as Splash screens is the desire to have parts of the form be “shadowed” or, in other words, blend with the forms behind them. You can see this effect in action with other application splash screens, such as photoshop:

Photoshop Splash Screen in front of a dead-sexy website

What witchcraft is this? How does Photoshop do it? One of the first things you might try with .NET is something like the TransparencyKey of the form. Of course, this doesn’t work, instead you get this unsightly ring of the transparency key around it.

The solution, of course, is a bit more complicated.

Starting with Windows 2000, the Win32 API and Window Manager has supported the idea of “layered” Windows. Before this, Windows had concepts known as “regions”; this basically allowed you to define regions of your window where the background would show through. This didn’t allow for per-pixel blending, but that sort of thing was not widely supported (or even conceived of, really) by most graphics Adapters. The “Layered” Windowing API basically provided a way to allow Per-pixel Alpha. Which is what we want.

Windows Forms, however, does not expose this layered window API through it’s methods or properties, with the exception of the opacity property. I don’t recall if WPF does either, but I would be surprised if it’s capabilities exposed more of the Layered Windowing API. Basically- we’re on our own

So what exactly do we need to do? Well, one thing we need to do is override the CreateParams property of the desired form, so that it adds the WS_EX_LAYERED style to the window, letting the Windowing Manager know it has to do more work with this window. Since we would like a neatly decoupled implementation, we are going to create a class that derives from Form, but use that as the base class for another form. This let’s us override the CreateParams property within that base class, but this has a bit of a caveat as well, since I’ve found that makes the Designer a bit annoyed and it complains and won’t let you use the designer. So you will have to deal with that particular point yourself. (I imagine there is a way to make it work, but I don’t want to bloat the class with such functionality). If necessary, the appropriate functions and the CreateParams override can be put into the classes that need this functionality instead.

Here is the PerPixelAlphaForm class. By the way, I’m going with Visual Basic.NET because there are already a million hits for this functionality with C#:

This provides the core implementation. The “Win32″ class here provides the needed API declarations.

In order to use this, we need to make our form derive from it, and then use the inherited SetBitmap function:

(Here I just used an image on my second Hard disk that had a transparency channel, but the Bitmap constructor parameter can easily be changed.). The result:

The code in action:

The Project I used for this can be downloaded from here . This was created using Visual Studio Professional 2012, Update 1- other editions or earlier versions may have problems with the project or source files.

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I was working on BASeBlock’s splash screen a bit, and thought it would be neat to have a little animation to expand and contract the list of loaded assemblies. I suddenly found myself wanting something similar to JQuery.

It didn’t seem inexorably difficult; so I got to work. Soon I had a simple little class that could move and size a object.

But that wasn’t enough. it wasn’t flexible enough- what if I wanted to animate, say, the background color, too? So I created a new project- BCQuery. The purpose is to provide a simple control animation framework; I came to realize that even restricting it to just controls could be limiting, so it really accepts any object at all.

The design is based around a simple threading model. Obviously, all UI actions (such as moving or interacting with Windows Forms controls) need to occur on the main application thread. Thankfully, Control’s expose a “Invoke” and “BeginInvoke” method that can be used to run code on that thread while closing over local variables, which is immensely useful.

This runner thread is only active while things are animating. When an animation is added and there is no thread running, it starts it; otherwise, when the last animation completes, the Thread removes itself. The interesting part is that it only uses one extra thread- All animations are performed concurrently here, with extra operations being queued up for execution in that thread before the iteration runs. One of the main concerns here is with the use of a foreach to iterate through and update each animation; since the animation can easily complete and there is no way to directly remove the instance from the collection without the next iteration of the foreach throwing an InvalidOperationException because the collection was changed. Code that needs or wants to remove or otherwise modify that collection can now do so by simply queuing up a piece of code to run the next time through the main animation loop.

I rather like how the project has come so far; I have it so I now need only two lines of code in a form to set up a basic “expando” whereby one control expands and the expander control moves. Given the amount of effort in dealing with what is essentially a finite state machine otherwise, this is extremely helpful IMO. Currently I have “easers” that can work with Size, Point, float, and int property’s, but it isn’t too much trouble to add more; the Point and Size versions use a corresponding easer of the appropriate type; for example, there is a PointFEaser, which uses two FloatEaser’s to ease the X and Y coordinates. This could be useful if I create custom float easers later on to support say… easing. (Though that is far from easy.

It works a treat, and will definitely be the subject of a future blog post.

It’s worth mention that this sort of library would be valueless for, say, WPF. This functionality is far better provided by WPF Storyboards via the Windows XAML rather than using something like this. But you can’t always use WPF, or don’t want to make something “heavy” that uses WPF, but might want some interesting animations like those you might need a simple storyboard for without writing too much code; and that’s what this library will be for.

EDIT: It didn’t exactly come to me quickly, but it did only take one debug run (I accidentally swapped two parameters because I named them poorly) before I had it working; considering it uses reflection to change members and properties on the fly, it works quite well. Definitely a class library to be expected with new releases of most of my projects, and of course available standalone.

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Many developers and programmers may describe their experience with a language or technology as them having “mastered” it. But is this really the case?

Take me as an example- I cannot think of a single technology that I feel comfortable saying I “mastered”; even those that I’ve worked with extensively, such as the C# language itself, or the .NET Framework, or the Java Base Class Library, I don’t feel safe saying I’ve “mastered”. The way I see it, “mastered” implies that for any question about that technology, you will have an answer for. I cannot, personally, say that I’ve reached that stage. In fact, it’s debatable whether any person reaches that stage about anything. C#-wise I’ve worked extensively with the framework, serialization, dynamic dispatch (via C# 4.0/5.0′s “dynamic” keyword).

“Mastered ” for me implies that there is nothing left to learn for that person in that field; but when you think about it, that’s sort of impossible, particularly in regards to software development, programming, and even just computers in general. There is always more to learn, there is always ground left uncovered, and as you uncover that ground you reveal just how much you don’t know. One of my favourite quotes, attributable to Dave Ward, is:

“the more you know, the more you realize just how much you don’t know. So paradoxically, the deeper down the rabbit hole you go, the more you might tend to fixate on the growing collection of unlearned peripheral concepts that you become conscious of along the way.”

This is from Scott Hanselmans blog post on a similar subject- titled “I’m a phony. Are you?”   In many ways, I find myself identifying with this- For example, I still often try to rationalize my reception of an MVP Award as “oh, it’s nothing” or “must have been a mistake”; that is, like the post describes and quotes, people that feel like an imposter. The MVP Award is not just given away to anybody, though. Best I can think of would be that my Blog posts with regard to C# Programming (and programming topics in general) were that good . Personally I have a hard time really believing that.

Much like Scott Hanselman describes in the post, I try to learn a new programming language- even if I don’t use it for a large project, the exposure to new concepts and problem domains can really improve my work in those languages that I’ve used for a longer period, and hold off stagnation. But even so, very seldom do I ever get deep enough into those languages to truly grasp their idioms.

And yet, at the same time, When I push myself into a language- I  eventually catch on. For example- and I’ve written about this before- I languished with Visual Basic 6 for a very long time. I thought it was good enough- there is nothing better. This is what I told others, but who was I trying to convince, them, or me? I aim for the latter. I don’t know what prompted me to do so but I moved on to C#. Now in fairness even then I did at least give other languages a shot, but VB6 was the only one that felt “familiar”; that is, that I could easily type code in without looking up documentation. At some point I’d had enough. Visual Basic 6 was an old, dead, language, and so too would my experience if I didn’t do something. I moved to C# instead of VB.NET mostly out of my own self-interest; I still had many projects in VB6 and I (possibly erroneously) thought that learning VB.NET might cloud my ability to work on those projects. That, and C# seemed to be the de riguer standard.

My first applications were rather simple. I made an attempt to duplicate the functionality of HijackThis first- this was a learning experience, particularly since I was now able to use those OO concepts I knew about but was never able to leverage properly in VB6, which only had interface inheritance. I moved forward with a simple game. This was to become the first version of BCDodger, which is a relatively simple game. The major stumbling block here was with regard to the use of multiple threads and handling concurrency and handling repainting. I eventually looked at my ancient ‘Poing’ game, which was an arkanoid/breakout clone I had written in Visual Basic 6. It was terrible- the drawing code was limited, everything was ugly and there was very little “whizbang” to the presentation. I decided to make a variant of the game in C#, using a better design and a class heirarchy. This snowballed pretty quickly, and I now have a game that is able to dynamically load new components from scripts (which it compiles at startup), has a fully-featured editor that is able to find and show any class that implements a specific interface or derives from a given class in portions of the interface; for example the “add block” toolbar dropdown get’s populated with every single block in the game, categorized based on attributes on the appropriate classes.

With Freelancing, my results have been met with an overwhelmingly positive response, in one case, where I was tasked with using Semantic cleanup of a longest common subsequence algorithm, there was some back-and forth over what might be the best output given what we were working with; the client eventually responded that they did some research and are pretty sure it’s impossible. By which time, I had actually finished implementing it. Needless to say, the results were very positive. The same applies for a similar project where I created the Product Key registration and generation logic in a self-contained class.

The nice thing is that these projects exposed me to things I might not have dealt with before. WPF was a technology I didn’t use until it’s appeal in a given situation made it very much preferable. Full screen, resolution independence was a lot easier with WPF than it would be with Windows Forms- so now I have experience with WPF as well. Naturally the overwhelmingly boring nature of Semantic cleanup of the output of a longest common subsequence algorithm (I nearly fell asleep writing that…) meant I wouldn’t otherwise explore it; however it turned out to be very interesting as well as mentally taxing. There was, of course, some confusion. But each time I was able to look at it with freshly rested eyes (apparently staying up for 48 hours working on the same problem clouds your judgement), I was able to find some very obvious fix or addition to resolve that which I was working on. I guess it boils down to- if you just write what you <want> you will always try to work on something interesting, but not always useful. When working on an actual project- for somebody else, or as an otherwise professional undertaking, what you work on might not always be fun, but it will always be useful to somebody. So in some respects this rubs off; with my own projects, I try to make them fun to work on, but might not always pay the closest attention to how useful they are; in retrospect when working in a professional capacity, whether they are useful is the most important goal. A program that isn’t useful is useless by definition.

This isn’t to say the experience isn’t occasionally frustrating; when you provide a product or service to somebody or something, I like to think there is some sort of a promise of the workmanship of that product; for example on more than one occasion, a product has stopped suiting the original purpose; for example, this could be because it was not as scalable as it needed to be, or perhaps a database corruption has caused some other problems. Whatever the case, since the product no longer works for the original intent, I could never charge for the service of getting the product working again- because that almost seems like holding them hostage.

At the same time, however, part of me doesn’t like releasing new products, simply because it feels like a lifetime contract to keep working on and improving them. This is part of why the vast majority of projects I’ve worked on I’ve not released. and by “vast  majority” we’re talking about nearly a hundred projects. Some big, some small; most of them unfinished in some fashion but most quite usable.

But I’m getting off the topic of this post. My point is, that I like to think I’m fairly awesome, but at the same time, not too awesome. There is plenty out there to learn, and the pursuit of awesomeness demands that I seek them out, absorb them, and then continue. Like a sponge that comes alive and wants to suction up all the water in the world, my task will never be completed. But that doesn’t stop me from trying anyway.

This applies in a general sense, as well; It’s not just programming that I’m very interested in, but rather tangential topics such as gaming and whatnot. I do also enjoy science-fiction- statistically, as a person who works in Software Development, this is more likely than not- as well as simply general knowledge. A good example being a tab I have open in my browser, where I was researching Eggplant. Why? I haven’t a clue. Just something I wanted to absorb and learn about, I suppose.

Conclusion: learning about Eggplants is unlikely to make you a better programmer. But it never hurts to stay versed on vegetables.

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