Author Archives: admin

Github.com Actions

  • Have you had the chance to check out github.com?
  • What about the Actions tab at github.com?
  • Do you use source control?
  • Do you want to be able to quickly test your set up cross platform using cmake?
  • What about proving that it’s possible to successfully build your project?

Recently I have spent a little bit of time trying to familiarize myself with some technology that I have not yet had the opportunity to use as much as I would have liked. As a developer, it’s often necessary to keep up with emerging languages and techniques.

Game Editor – Concepts of game creation

Game Editor – Concepts of game creation

Found a nifty little site and editor for assisting with simple game creation and editing. I played around a little bit with it, enough to make a cheap little pacman game. The editor is nice because there is minimal coding required to get up a game running quickly. The main issues in terms of rendering, timing, loading graphics etc. are taken care of you by the click of a mouse.

Game Editor.com

Dot Net html editor to image

Dot Net html editor to image

While working on a commercial project, I was involved in providing a simple html rendering engine. Simple in terms of not being 100% complete, not necessarily in complexity. To help debug this, I created a sample app that demonstrates the workings of an html editor and the rendering in action.

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Reusing the WebBrowser Control

Reusing the WebBrowser Control

I have found the need in several projects as of late to reuse the WebBrowser Control in .net  languages such as c#/vb.net. I have not ventured into the j# domain, but I have also played around with c++.net a little bit for various projects. There are a couple of things to keep in mind when reusing the control in different scenarios – most of which for my purposes do not include in a windows form for display purposes. For the most part making sure that there is a reference to System.Windows.Forms dll is in your References and making sure that the using or imports statements are also included this is a good first start.

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Unexpected Error Adding new Data Connection in Visual Studio

Unexpected Error Adding new Data Connection in Visual Studio

Recently I was adding a Data Connection in Visual Studio, and I found that I kept getting an error message box whenever I tried.

There were a number of suggestions such as:

devenv.exe /reset

and doing a repair install which didn’t work.

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Updating to Joomla 2.5

Updating to Joomla 2.5

NOTE: Do not do this on a live server, backup and test mileage before deploy as components and modules might not be available. Also templates need to be updated

It’s getting pretty easy to update things these days and Joomla is no exception. There is a component that you can get for the joomla 1.5 branch and later that is called jupdate. This component works pretty good as long as your permissions are set correctly. IE if you are not running as a specific user in php that has write permissions to the root of your site, then it may be a problem during the update phase.

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Office WebDav and Javascript

So…. long story short it is possible to reuse office within the browser by using the Word ActiveX control as well as most other Office products like Excel and Powerpoint. The problem then becomes editing the information. There is a registry tweak that enables this with the default ActiveX control, however, the sharepoint dll which provides a nicer interface out of the box allows what you need to do without changes to the registry and also ships with office since 2007 according to outside sources.

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First Quarter 2012

It appears that the first quarter of 2012 has come and gone and I have had little time for a post. It’s easter weekend for anyone that cares, but I don’t think that matters now. I have not had one chance to look over anything that I have wanted to write about for 4 months and I doubt that is going to change any time soon. I have been working a lot with MAPI in the months of late, and as well with asp.net and have come across some problems and found solutions for them. In case you are wondering, simple mapi is awesome but kind of useless in the same token, but extended MAPI is way awesome in terms of power and scalability, but hardly easy to use. That is to say, that it’s not all spelled out for you the way that you would like. My experiences with this have been mostly for a console program, but I am finding that without a message pump, it’s extremely difficult to get messages ( This is tip #1 ). The problem is that I would like to call on this program to deliver a message every so often. The obvious solutions of course are to install a message pump and run for a small time frame, or convert into a tcp/udp/service application.

Status Update – SwhistleSoft Blog

Status Update – SwhistleSoft Blog December

It has been almost an entire month of no postings so I figured I would post a quick little ditty. For those of you hoping to make it in the software industry, you should check out “7 wonders of the Industrial World” as seen on Netflix or elsewhere. This series of episodes outlines some struggles that happened to almost everyone surrounding these technological feats, some of which included sickness, and death. When setting out to do something worth while, it is important to remember that there will be struggles along the way, but that perseverance makes it to the finish line.

Happy Holidays