Frank Tovar's blog

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:

using System;
using System.Threading;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Automation;
using System.Windows.Interop;
using System.Windows.Threading;

public static class UiHelper
{
    public static void ShowDialogInNewThread<T>(object dataContext, Action<T> onComplete) where T : Window, new()
    {
        Thread thread = new Thread(() =>
        {
            SynchronizationContext.SetSynchronizationContext(new DispatcherSynchronizationContext(Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher));
            var window = new T();
            window.DataContext = dataContext;
            window.Closed += (s, e) => Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher.BeginInvokeShutdown(DispatcherPriority.Background);
            window.Show();

            IntPtr handle = new WindowInteropHelper(window).Handle;
            AutomationElement element = AutomationElement.FromHandle(handle);
            if (element != null)
            {
                element.SetFocus();
            }

            System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.Run();
            onComplete(window);
        });

        thread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA);
        thread.IsBackground = true;
        thread.Start();
        thread.Join();
    }
}

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 that is not enough so that clients can consume it. The default “you have created a service” page offers you a link to the WSDL version of the service, where the URL scheme is like this: http://servername/namespace-servicename.svc?wsdl. But there is the problem. Visiting that URL doesn’t show any WSDL, it shows the “you have created a service” page again.

After hanging around in google for a few hours, I finally found the missing puzzle piece… you have to create a SOAP endpoint, in order to get the automatic WSDL generation working! Just add the following lines to your Web.Config file:

<system.serviceModel>
  <domainServices>
    <endpoints>
      <add name="Soap" transmitMetadata="true" type="Microsoft.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.SoapXmlEndpointFactory, Microsoft.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" />
    </endpoints>
  </domainServices>
</system.serviceModel>

After having done that, you can go to your client app, Add Service Reference, give the URL to the .svc file, and you’re done.

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 details, here is the picture of the result (click for a larger version):

The terrain and the hollow cube are triangle meshes, and the white sphere is raytraced. I want to explain how I set up the rendering pipeline. Continue reading »