Laumania.net

My show and tell post

mads@laumania.net — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 20:14:33 +0200

I’m following the Code52 group and this weeks project is about writing an article/post about something that you have done recently.
This is my “Show and Tell” post – and it’s going to be about “We Are Bugs – XNA”.

I recently posted about this actually, but it was a fun little project to do, so why not blog a little more about it.

“We Are Bugs” is originally a small game created in Silverlight (for the browser) by Jeff Weber.

Here you see the browser version – you can play it here by the way.

So, I told that Jeff Weber created the game, which means I clearly didn’t – so what did I do?

I have known this little game since Jeff originally posted it, but had forgot about it. Some weeks ago I remembered it searched for it. I saw that the source could be found on Codeplex.
Since Jeff created the game Windows Phone have been born, so I thought – why not port this little game to run on the Windows Phone?

And so I did – in about 10 min.!

As this was a little too easy I put up a new challenge – let’s rewrite this Silverlight version to XNA.

And so I did – this took a little more than 10 min.

Eventhough the two above screenshots look pretty much the same, the code underneath is very different.

My goal with this rewrite were to try and keep the XNA port as close as possible to the original Silverlight code, eventhough Silverlight and XNA works pretty differently.

Lucky for you I have put this whole beast on Github – https://github.com/Laumania/WeAreBugs-XNA

As you can see I have created some issues on this project, for minor things I didn’t had time to implement.
So in the spirit of social coding and open-source, I invite you to fork the code and fix/implement some of these issues.

- Enjoy

With Mercurial/Git - contributing is SO easy

mads@laumania.net — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 13:50:00 +0200

In relation to my post some days ago about social coding and DVCS, I had a great sample the other day why this is so great.

I recently upgraded my blog to the latest version of BlogEngine.net, which wasn’t easy. I guess most of my problems were because I went from version 1.5 to 2.5 or something, which is a pretty big jump.

Nevertheless, I had a lot of problems to just make a clean installation of BlogEngine.net work on my host. My blog runs on Shared-hosting, which gives some wierd problems from time to time.

I managed to google my way to resolving all the errors I ran into – that’s great!

I were still a bit pissed as I it were way to hard to make a clean installation work, so (I’m honest here ) I flamed a little on the discussion on BlogEngine.net’s codeplex.com site. Yes, I maybe shouldn’t have done that, but I did, was to tired of this not working. An actually something great came out of this, look at the response to my comment here.

Source

This rtur guy is pretty smart, he tells me contribute with my changes – which I honestly hadn’t thought about (as patching use to be SO hard and stupid on Codeplex and I don’t even want to come near it – sadly.
A little side note, look at the time stamps. From he suggesting me to contribute, it takes me less than an hour, actually much less than an hour (I wasn’t at the PC right when he wrote that), to contribute to the project as described below – pretty look!

Fork, Fix and Pull

All my problems were fixed via altering the web.config. So as rtur suggested me - Why not put these things into the web.config that skips with BlogEngine.net, so others avoid or might have an easier way to comment in these changes?
(I’m aware that my changes might cause problems for people with other setups, but I would let it be up to the BlogEngine.net crew to determine which part they would put into the next release)

As mentioned BlogEngine.net is hosted on Codeplex.com. Codeplex have recently added support for Mercurial(HG) and latest Git. No more stupid TFS patching on Codeplex!
The BlogEngine.net team have moved there code to Mercurial, so all my newly obtained knowledge about DVCS (in my case Git), should be very usefull here.

Therefore I logged into Codeplex and created a Fork of the BlogEngine.net repository.

After naming the fork, I could then clone my fork with TortoiseHg to my computer.

Then I opened up the solution in Visual Studio and manually merged my web.config changes into their web.config.

Then I commited my changes and push them back to my fork on Codeplex.com.

Then I went to my fork in the browser and send a pull request to the BlogEngine.net team.

After a day or so, rtur had merged some of my changes into the web.config and commented on my pull request.

And thereby I became an contributor to a open-source project – which is a really good feeling when you are a developer – at least for me.

I want to thank Scott Hanselman for this post, which opened my eyes to DVCS and real open-source!

Code52, social coding and DVCS

mads@laumania.net — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 23:11:30 +0200

Back in january (2012) I read a blogpost by Scott Hanselman about getting involved in open-source. He wrote about a new "group" called Code52, which did a new coding project each week. It sounded interesting, so I looked into it.

Ever since, I have been following along Code52's projects via their Jabbr channel and on Github. Eventhough I haven’t had the time to participate yet, it’s really motivating to see how people collaborate and make things happen.
As a developer you can really learn ALOT from collaborating with other developers and this part really excites me about this whole project. That’s why I have on my todo-list to participate in at least one Code52 project in 2012.

The first thing learned (and I didn’t even actively participated in a project – I were just observing) by following along Code52 were Github and how it enables developers to collaborate.
Later I found out that it wasn’t really specific to Github, but more the DVCS (Git), which Github depends upon. With Git (and Mercurial for that matter) you can “Fork” a repository, so you have your own copy of it, then you make some changes and the do a “Pull request” (kind of a patch) to the owner of the repository you forked.
This might sound complicated, and frankly, this and other stuff about Git IS hard to wrap your head around at first, but when you do (and I don’t even understand it all yet – far from) you start to see the power of this and the awsomeness of DVCS.

I have spend quite some time trying to understand Git and DVCS, and here are some helpfull links.
Read here to understand how Git works: http://think-like-a-git.net/
This is a great Windows client for using Git: http://code.google.com/p/gitextensions/
Another cool Windows client for Git: http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/

The best way to learn is to play around with it, so create an account on Github and do as I did, create a repository that you can play around with – I called my “GitPlayground”.

You can find me on Github under the name Laumania. Feel free to follow me, or maybe fork my WeAreBugs-XNA repository and implement some of the missing features

XNA port of "We Are Bugs"

mads@laumania.net — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 23:05:00 +0200

Some weeks ago I came by Jeff Webers (aka Farseer Games) small game "We Are Bugs". I thought about if this game could be easially ported from browser Silverlight to a Windows Phone app in Silverlight.

It turned out that it was VERY easy to do actually.

Next up I wanted to challenge myself a little, so I set the goal to port "We Are Bugs" to XNA too.

This part was actually also surprisingly easy and lucky for you - I put that whole thing on Github (as I'm also playing around with Github these days).

So go grab the source from Github and see how a Silverlight game could look in XNA.

WindowsPhoneFan.dk - a site for WP7 users in Denmark

mads@laumania.net — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 22:00:00 +0200

I have been hooked in Windows Phone from the first time I saw it. I have a LG Optimus 7 now, which I bought for about a year ago. This phone has been my primary phone (only phone) for the last year - and I still like it :)

In the summer I started searching for a danish site about Windows Phone. Apparently there wasn't any community/news site for Windows Phone users in Denmark.

So, I started it :)

In June I started a new danish community site - WindowsPhoneFan.dk

Eventhough the site is relatively new and Windows Phone isn't that know in Denmark these days, WindowsPhoneFan.dk is seeing greatly increasing trafic week by week. It's amazing!

It's always cool when people are liking what you do, and apparently 4-500 people like the site so much that they visit it everyday - so I'm happy.

Hopefully more people will join as Windows Phone gets more known in Denmark, as right now, it's mostly the nerds knowing about it. :)

ScriptTD for Windows Phone

mads@laumania.net — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 23:23:00 +0200

I first heard of this little "framework/engine/template/starterkit"-thing some months ago - ScriptTD.

ScriptTD is basically a template for a Tower Defense Game for Windows Phone, that you can change (pretty much actually) just by editing XML files.

The project is done in XNA and I have played around with it little now and it's really great. It's amazing how much you can change and how different you can make the game just by editing XML. ScriptTD is open source, so if you know XNA and want to make a Tower Defense Game, ScriptTD should be your starting point.

I just submittet a small game I made (with help from family members for sounds and graphics). The game is called "Frost Defense" and will be in the Marketplace in the coming weeks (I hope :) I'll write about it when it's ready to download).

So, if you want to make a Tower Defense Game for Windows Phone - you should take a look at ScriptTD at Codeplex.com.

Long time - no blogging

mads@laumania.net — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 23:11:00 +0200

(Warning: So this is one of these typically "I haven't blog for a while" post. There is nothing developer related content or good juice in this post, so if you feel like skipping a post - this is it :))

So it's been a while since I have blogged. Actually it's been a while since I have been active at my blog, at twitter or anything else on the internet - why you ask?

Well, I just bought house :)

So over the summer me and my family have been living in a temporarily apartment (as we sold our old one before we got our house). Then we got the house and have been working on fixing it up since then.

So right now I'm spending all of my "free time" working on the house...and not on my blog or twitter or coding for the matter.

Luckily it should be done more or less soon - so hopefully I will be back at my blog soon, or at least at twitter.

Make ASP.NET Label render as HTML Label tag

mads@laumania.net — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 19:49:00 +0200

By default the <asp:Label /> control in ASP.NET render as a <span> HTMl tag. That can be kind of a problem if you have some CSS that only applies to an <label> tag. So, how do you make a <asp:label /> render as a <label> tag?

Actually it's pretty easy. All you need to to is to set the "AssociatedControlID" on the <asp:Label /> to an associated text. The reason for this is that you usually use a label as the caption for a textbox, as it is the nature of the HTML <label> tag.

Plan bee wins 1st place in Windows Phone 7 competition

mads@laumania.net — Mon, 30 May 2011 21:36:55 +0200

Back in February 2011, we submitted ‘plan bee’ to a Danish Windows Phone 7 competition organized by Microsoft. The results are here now…

As you might have guessed already, due to the not so discreet title of this post, we won 1st place in the Game category! Hooray!
You can see blog post here

We are very happy and have now been blessed with a Xbox 360, a Windows Phone 7 and a Kinect. (See proof below )

Want to give the game a try – get it here:

Dotfuscator–Resign assemblies manually?

mads@laumania.net — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 19:56:35 +0200

I were just setting up some “tracking” on a Windows Phone 7 application, using PreEmptive Solutions Dotfuscator, when I got some odd problem. First I just setup all up as I use to and deployed to the WP7 emulator. Application started and shutdown right away. Hmm, I tried again and again, same thing happened. I then looked closer at the “Build Output” window in Dotfuscator and saw this at the bottom:

“Warning: The strong named input assemblies (or assembly) {Assembly name and path here } were not resigned. You will need to sign these dotfuscated assemblies manually”

I could figure out that the reason why I needed to resign it, were because dotfuscator have had a look on it – I therefore needed to figure out how to avoid it to do so.

It turns out that you can exclude assemblies inside dotfuscator, just go to the “Input” tab, expand your .xap file until you find the assembly that gives you problems, right click it and pick “Exclude assembly from Package”.

Just a little help if anybody else ends up with this problem

- Enjoy!