Visual Studio 2012 Bugs

Visual Studo 2012 has a nice add-in called the Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Feedback Tool that lets you quickly report a bug to the connect website. I’ve found that making it easy to report bugs in VS has increased the likelihood that I actually will report bugs. With Connect, any user can add a “me too!” vote to someone else’s public bugs so that the product team has a better idea of the people affected by it. You can also add your own comments to someone else’s public bugs. This post will be updated over time with bugs I’ve filed so that you can add your own “me too!” vote or comment to the bug.

Engineering Notebooks: High Level Thoughts and TDD To Do Lists

Ever since I was in college as an electrical engineering student, I’ve been advised to have an “engineering notebook”. The general recommendation was to have a single place where you wrote down all the important details of your work. In the case of circuit design, dated notes could be particularly important for establishing prior art in patenting intellectual property. However, since my career was headed in the software direction and software patents were not yet common, I didn’t give it much thought. As my career progressed, I found I had two kinds of information that I needed to write down as a software engineer: notes from meetings and design discussions and low-level task details related to the code I’m working on day-to-day. In this post, I’ll discuss a simple system that I’ve adopted for engineering notebooks that makes sense for software engineers practicing test-driven development (TDD).

An HTTP Server in TECO

The Summer 2012 Retrochallenge Competition is on for the month of July, 2012. I’m going to implement a small web server in TECO and update this page with progress on my implementation.

Game Debugging in Visual Studio 11

If you haven’t watched any of the //build presentations yet, there was one that got me quite excited where they showed off some of the new graphics debugging support in Visual Studio 11. Game Debugging in Visual Studio 11 is a recent Visual Studio team blog entry that goes into more detail on this. Now you can really drill down into the details of the graphics pipeline based on what you’re seeing in the rendered window and some mouse clicks. This is going to be awesome!

Fall 2011 Utah Code Camp Schedule Posted

They’ve posted the schedule for the Fall 2011 Utah Code Camp. I’ve got two sessions: one on push notifications with Windows Phone 7 and a roundtable discussion to get a C++ user’s group going in Utah. C++ for the win!

Utah Fall Code Camp 2011

The Utah Fall Code Camp 2011 is coming up and I’ve proposed a number of talks and volunteered to present some that didn’t yet have speakers. If any of these sessions sound interesting to you, please visit the Utah Code Camp web site and vote for them.

• Open Source Development Track: Recursive Descent Parsers with Boost.Spirit
• Microsoft Development Track: Powering Managed Applications with the GPU and SlimDX
• Architecture Track: High Performance C++, or How to Make Friends With the Cache

The following talks already existed but had no speaker yet, so I volunteered to give them:

• Mobile Development Track: Push Notifications and Tiles for Windows Phone
• Mobile Development Track: Game Development for the Windows Phone 7.5

“Domain Specific Languages” by Martin Fowler

In 2011, Martin Fowler wrote “Domain Specific Languages” published by Addison-Wesley. Examples of domain specific languages you might have encountered before are regular expression specifications, Makefiles, Direct3D’s high level shader language (HLSL), OpenGL’s GL shader language (GLSL), the Wavefront object file format (.obj) or input specifications to the compiler tools lex (.l) and yacc (.y). Fowler defines a domain specific language as “a computer programming language of limited expressiveness focused on a particular domain.” Domain specific languages (DSLs) have been around for a long time, but to date there hasn’t been any general treatment of the techniques and characteristics of DSLs in general, as opposed to the traits of a particular DSL. Fowler’s book is a good first entry.

Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing

The Computer History Museum has a new electronic exhibit: Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing. There is a section giving a broad stroke outline of the history of computer graphics as well as other areas of computing. Check it out! If you’re ever in Silicon Valley (Mountain View, CA), I recommend you visit the museum in person to see some of the items from their collection in person.

Don’t buy from ebay seller carp-o-matic

I bought an SGI Indigo^2 workstation from ebay seller carp-o-matic. An Indigo^2 is a heavy machine. The seller packed it in a used cardboard box with crumpled up newspaper around the sides and top and no padding on the bottom. End result? A smashed up workstation. I contacted the seller and they refused to do anything about it. They are not a reputable seller and I recommend that you not do business with them.

Utah Code Camp this Saturday, March 19th.

Once again Utah’s developers will be sharing their insights and knowledge free with other developers! Come to the Utah Code Camp this Saturday! Check out their web site for directions and schedule.

This marks the first time in several years that I will not be presenting at the Utah Code Camp. I just didn’t have a good topic ready in time for the camp, but I’ve got a few ideas for presentations that will probably be ready next time. However, as a presenter I am so busy with my own presentation logistics that I always miss out on all the other good presentations at the camp, so I’m excited to simply attend and listen to what other developers have been up to.

Concurrent with the Utah Code Camp will be Pod Camp SLC. This should give you plenty to choose from when deciding what sessions to attend.

See you there!

“General and Special Purpose Computers”, 1986

Government Attic released a heavily redacted copy of the report “General and Special Purpose Computers: A Historical Look and Some Lessons Learned” from 1986. Its interesting that a report from 25 years ago is still considered to have sensitive information that needs to be redacted in response to a FOIA request. (Unlike wikileaks, government attic obtains documents legally through the Freedom of Information Act.)

Agile Roundtable Notes for October, 2010

The Salt Lake Agile Roundtable meets the first Thursday of every month at the Borders bookstore in Murray, UT from 2pm to 5pm. These are my notes from the October, 2010 meeting.

AgileRoots 2010 Videos

Videos of the presentations at AgileRoots 2010 are up for free viewing on confreaks. If you missed my presentation “You Can Test Anything!” with Zhon Johansen at the recent Utah Code Camp, you can catch an earlier slightly less polished version at confreaks.

INETA Community Speaker

A while back I registered as a community speaker with INETA. They’ve now launched their community speaker site where you can browse speaker profiles and invite them to come to your .NET user group meeting to talk on a specific subject. You can check out my profile on there by searching for XNA and finding me in the list from Salt Lake City, UT. I’ve also added a “INETA Speaker” block to the sidebar of the blog to make it easy for you to have me present to your group :-).

Microsoft MVP for Another Year!

On October 1st, 2010 I was awarded Microsoft MVP status for another year of helping developers with Microsoft’s 3D related technologies of DirectX and XNA, although mostly DirectX. This marks the 9th consecutive year in which I’ve been awarded MVP status. In these past 9 years we’ve watched the PC’s graphics card make the transition from something that might not have hardware accelerated vertex processing to the array of parallel processors in the current generation of graphics cards. Besides the obvious addition of more shader cores on the GPU, what will the next 9 years hold for the PC’s graphics card? Will image-based and video-based rendering become commonplace and mainstream? Will 3D finally penetrate into the display, removing that pesky Z divide in the projection matrix? Its hard to say, but as always, it will be interesting to find out!

Need Tessellation?

Try libtess2, a refactored version of the GLU tessellation code from OpenGL. Brought to you by Digesting Duck.

Max Iter’s Fractal Follies

Roger Alexander has been posting a series of fractint parameter sets on the fractint user’s list and to his blog “Max Iter’s Fractal Follies”. Similar to the images and RSS feed I created for Jim Muth’s Fractal of the Day series, I have created a feed of 1600×1200 high-resolution 3x antialiased images generated from the parameter sets. You can browse the images and subscribe to the RSS feed to enjoy Roger’s work. Thanks Roger!

SGI IRIS 3130 Joins the Collection

Silicon Graphics Inc., more commonly known as SGI, produced a series of 3D graphics hardware architectures beginning in the mid 1980s. Their first product line was the IRIS series of terminals and workstations based on the Motorola 68000 processor. Over the years that I’ve been building the collection for my museum of computer graphics history, I’ve managed to obtain most of the SGI product line except for the first generation IRIS machines and the Fuel and Tezro which are still too expensive. Recently I came across an opportunity to get an SGI IRIS 3130. This is the largest model in the IRIS product line which consists of the IRIS 1000, IRIS 2000 and IRIS 3000 series machines. The IRIS machines were featured in an episode of Computer Chronicles from April 5th, 1984. I’ve got some pictures of the IRIS 3130 I’ve acquired on picasaweb.

XNA Game Studio 4.0 Released

Download. Now you can get the Xbox 360 and Windows version as well as the version for Windows Phone 7.

Utah Code Camp Fall 2010 Schedule

The preliminary schedule has been posted for the Fall 2010 Utah Code Camp on September 25th. I’ll be presenting two sessions: an updated version of my presentation on making internet-enabled applications for Windows Phone 7 and updated version of “You Can Test Anything!” with Zhon Johansen. I’ll have some Windows Phone 7 swag to give out and an MSDN Universal subscription to give away as well. Code Camps are always free and are for the developer community and by the developer community.

There will also be an agile roundtable at Code Camp facilitated by Zhon Johansen. Zhon recently presented on the highly successful agile roundtable we have here in Salt Lake City at the Agile 2010 conference. The local roundtable has been going steady for 10 years and is a great resource to any developer looking to improve their team skills in an agile environment.