Author: xTr1m

Showing a topmost WPF window from a background service

I’m writing a plugin in .NET that’s hosted on a windows service running in the background. There I want to display a WPF modal window that should be activated and stay on top as soon as it gets shown. This is the only way I found that worked for me:

Read More

Preparation for this year’s Devmania’s overnight game development contest

I’ve had this idea for quite some time, and now it seems like I’m going to be able to accomplish it. Since the last Devmania I’ve been quite satisfied with the tools I’ve used to develop Angry Pirates, but it was a single player game. I want to use C#, XNA, Farseer Physics and eventually…

Read More

Automatic WSDL creation for WCF Domain Services

Today I’ve spent several hours trying to create a Domain Service for Windows Azure and having a Metro-style App consume that service. Creating the Domain Service is easy, just add a new Domain Service class, create a public method inside it, build, done. You can open it with the well-known URL scheme http://servername/namespace-servicename.svc. But doing…

Read More

Gaia Machina

I visited Revision 2012, a demoparty held in Saarbrücken, Germany. The winner of the PC 64k compo was an intro by Approximate. I must say that I’m astonished by the level of detail and love they put into this production. This is what I was hoping for since I know the demoscene. Do more nature…

Read More

Combining raytraced and mesh rendering with multisampling using Direct3D 10.1

I’m working on a 64k intro and decided to render scenes, where most of their content is based on triangle meshes. I also want to display some raytraced objects at the same time. Both rendering methods should use multisampling, and the painter’s algorithm should be simulated correctly as expected using Z-Tests. Before we enter into…

Read More

Silverlight 5 RC and MEF

I just spent much time refactoring my recently released Silverlight 4 project at work to use Silverlight 5, with in-browser elevated trust enabled. We want to get rid of having to use Isolated Storage for temporary storage, instead we want to use a folder inside of the client’s My Documents folder. After going through every…

Read More

About the Windows Experience Index score

I admit, it’s fancy and inspires some competition amongst the IT/development crew. But it doesn’t always work right. The Windows Experience Index (WEI) score for disk performance shouldn’t be taken too seriously, after my recent experience: My current PC configuration includes two 40GB Intel X-25V SSD drives, one for the system and one for the…

Read More

Two-way XAML to BB-code converter

I’m working on a Silverlight project, where I wanted to enable my users to send private messages to each other, while enjoying the features of the RichTextBox. I also wanted to implement a search feature, so that my users could find their messages easily. It turns out, that the only way, that I could easily…

Read More

Welcome!

Since I’ve already had many moments where I wanted to share some of my findings with the rest of the world, I finally decided to create a decent blog. I hope you find my contributions useful. Feel free to leave comments.

Read More