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.

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!

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.

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.

Channel 9 Video: Stephan T. Lavavej on the Standard Template Library

Stephan T. Lavavej has created another great video on the C++ Standard Template Library (STL) over on Channel 9. I’ve watched Stephan’s videos before and they always prove illuminating and worthwhile. Check it out!

Agile Roundtable Notes September 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 September, 2010 meeting.

Utah Fall Code Camp on Sept. 25th, 2010

Utah Fall Code Camp on September 25th, 2010. I’ve submitted several sessions to the organizers: one on using DirectWrite in C# with SlimDX, an enhanced version of my talk on internet enabled applications for Windows Phone 7 and an updated version of the “You Can Test Anything!” session that Zhon Johansens and I delivered at AgileRoots 2010.

Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Beta

Microsoft released the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Beta yesterday. Be sure to read the release notes as lots of things have changed since the April Community Technology Preview release.

Kittygedon