March 2006 - Posts

Friday, March 31, 2006 5:45 AM

Happy Birthday Promit

To a good friend that I have known for almost a year now. Happy birthday bud. I hope you have an awesome day. Promit is friend that I met on #graphicsdev who has become a good friend of mine.

I hope you have an awesome day and thanks for everything.
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Posted by pieterg | with no comments
Tuesday, March 28, 2006 6:03 AM

Microsoft, Durban Institute of Technology, SADeveloper.Net and Firefly had one awesome event at DIT yesterday

The event which didn’t go as expect, but which event does? turned into one awesome meeting with nearly 100 students and staff attending. The session was presented by Kim Midgley from newsolutions which was on a Demo driven introduction to Visual Studio 2005 (Team Edition). The talk covered most aspects of the SDLC such as Project management, Solution Architect’s role in the project and also a developer and tester’s role and how Team System is able to provide a better support for those roles.

I would like to see more people from industry come into academia.

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Posted by pieterg | 1 comment(s)
Friday, March 24, 2006 4:34 PM

Kim Midgley at DIT

This monday Kim Midgley will be talking at the Durban Institute of Technology. I would like to invite everyone to come to the talk. The details about the talk and venue are on www.sadeveloper.net.

I hope to see alot of you there.
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Posted by pieterg | with no comments
Saturday, March 11, 2006 1:11 PM

Physics Sample using ODE

Now what would a game be without physics?
Pretty boring hey? Imagine hitting a wall and the bricks just staring at you. Now wouldn't that be fun. We at MDXInfo.com have made it our goal to provide samples, tutorials and articles for real world applications using Managed DirectX. We have taken a step back and added a nice physics sample using ODE.NET which is a managed wrapper around ODE (Open Dynamics Engine)

Here is a screenshot to the sample



Here is the download link to the sample
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Posted by pieterg | 3 comment(s)
Tuesday, March 07, 2006 7:08 PM

SADeveloper.NET Durban event ROCKS!

Tonight we had a strat session and obviously some general geek chat. Really what more can you ask for than cheese burgers and coke.

First Ruari wanted to throw me off the 32nd floor of the North Beach Southern Sun hotel.. that didn't work since I didn't bring my wings with me. He decided to take photos instead... We then marched towards the beach front on the search for some Burgers!!!

We found a spot and then the geek chat begun...
I just have one question...
What does SADeveloper.NET mean to you?

I had lots of fun :)
Thanks.
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Posted by pieterg | with no comments
Friday, March 03, 2006 10:02 AM

C++, C++/CLI and C# (PInvoke and Managed Wrappers)

I have been doing some coding the last few days and I thought that for the fun and heck of it i'll post some of my research here...

C++ has long been a very involved language and with that I mean the difficult topics such as decent pointer handling and memory management in general. C++/CLI is the new specification for C++ language extensions and it supersedes the previous Managed C++ which was very ugly to work with in the sense of readability.

C++/CLI introduces the new concept of handles which refers to a managed reference to an object where as pointers just point to a memory location.

C++/CLI serves as a good wrapping language around legacy code in the sense that if you have some C++ code base you could easily wrap this code and start taking advantage of the CLR.

The conversion of the day is converting char* to String^ and back.
Taking a look at how to convert a char* to a String^ brings to light one method from the Marshal class.
Marshal::StringToHGlobalUni() which copies data from a managed String into unmanaged memory.

This method returns a pointer that will point to the unmanaged memory location. Storing that in a IntPtr should work and converting that IntPtr to a pointer is all that's left.

Example
String^ managedName = "Pieter";
char* unmanagedName = new char;
IntPtr ptr = Marshal::StringToHGlobalUni(managedName);
unmanagedName  = (char*)ptr.ToPointer();
Marshal::FreeHGlobal(ptr);

Converting a char* is very easy since the String class constructor takes a const char* :)

Example
char* unmanagedName = "Pieter";
String^ managedName = gcnew String(unmanagedName);

That's enough garbling for today ;)
I have some DirectX fun to attend too.
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Posted by pieterg | 1 comment(s)
Friday, March 03, 2006 8:12 AM

Project is underway - Versioning Control System

 Me and my team at Technikon are going to tackle a versioning control system. The system will be tightly integrated into Visual Studio and will also contain a bug tracking system.

This is a project that will make us pass our last year at Technikon (hopefully). I will be posting my research here. Stay tuned.

As far as DirectX is going, I am going to try and incorporate some DirectX goodness into the project as well ;)
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Posted by pieterg | 18 comment(s)