Victor Stodell

Lately I've been working pretty hard on different projects but not really stumbling upon anything blogworthy. The most recent project is quite interesting though, a single page, touch friendly, web application using the latest and greatest technologies. We've ended up with using Brunch with Chaplin , which is a very neat way of setting up a Backbone based single page web project with Brunch and Chaplin . Aside from this, I have my own little project that has lived on for almost 15 years already, The Cornball . From being a plain Windows application written i C an Win32 API, it has been ported to .NET using WPF, and is currently a Silverlight application hosted on Windows Azure. I could not find a better time to reanimate this project and create a new web based version, touch friendly, super optimized, awesome in any way. So I did... So please follow my journey at Github . It's going to take a while, I assure you, but I already have some ground work done. Meanwhile,...

The release of Silverlight 5 is allegedly the last major release of Silverlight , but it brought some great stuff that I have now incorporated in the latest release of The Cornball . There are a lot of good descriptions and even video samples of the new features in  What's new in Silverlight 5 . These are the two new features that I am using in The Cornball . Mouse Button Double Click Previously I have used a custom implementation with a timer to capture double clicks on the cards. But since this feature finally is included in the framework I decided to use that instead. The MouseButtonEventArgs now has a ClickCount property which simply indicates the number of times the mouse button was clicked. That leaves us with a much cleaner implementation of the single and double click scenario. private void CardMouseLeftButtonDown(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e) { switch (e.ClickCount) { case 1: // Handle single click break; case 2: ...

I have been using the Team Foundation Services preview for a while now, and the least I can say is that I am impressed! The web interface has a nice Metro style design and gives a high quality experience overall. By installing the KB2581206  hotfix I can also access my TFS account from Visual Studio, which is absolutely fantastic. I might even sound a bit fanatic by saying that it is like a dream come true... The server appears as a traditional Team Foundation Server in Visual Studio apart from the logon process (a Windows Live popup window). Read more and try it out yourself! Besides playing around with the user interface I have actually tried to work a little seriously with the service as well. Partly by uploading my project the Cornball and developing against the TFS in Visual Studio. So far this experience is very positive and I have not found any issues or oddities at all, except that the environment is kind of slow. This whole thing also takes me one step further out i...

When e-mail, files and blog are already in the cloud the Cornball is the only application left on my hosting provider. It is now getting really exciting because there is no doubt that the Corball should move to the Microsoft cloud, Windows Azure . The Cornball is a Silverlight  application which communicates through a  WCF  service with a  MySQL  database, all on the same hosting provider. This is about to be converted into a  Silverlight  application which communicates through a  WCF  service on  Windows Azure  that in turn communicates with an SQL Azure  database. Microsoft have published a lot of information to  get started with Windows Azure , but basically it is quite simple. After downloading the tools and SDK it is just to get on with the development. Through my MSDN subscription I have got some free Azure capacity so just by logging on to the Windows Azure portal  I am ready to configure ...

I cannot with words describe the hype around the cloud today, and of course I had to join the croud. I have transferred all my applications, files and services to the cloud. I thought I would share some of the experiences and difficulties I have hit during my jourey. These are the steps I have performed in order to complete my move to the cloud: Most of my files are safely stored with  Dropbox . E-mail accounts for stodell.se  were moved from service provider to  Google Apps . The Cornball was moved from service provider to  Windows Azure och SQL Azure . This blog was moved from Wordpress at a service provider to  Google's Blogger . Even though  Loopia has been a great service provider during many years I have now been able to cancel all my services except the domain hosting with them. The replacement being free services and the Azure capacity that is included in the MSDN subscription.

In my work with the Cornball as my first Silverlight project I have had to solve a huge amount of problems which turned out to be quite a high threshold before I could get started with the development for real. Not the least in the difference between a WinForms application and a Silverlight application. In this post I will mention a couple of the things i encountered. Splash Screen/Preloader The builtin preloader in Silverlight does not look too bad, but it is definately more fun to create a custom preloader to fit with the rest of the application. I choose to create a very simple but functional preloader. First I had to include all the images as resources in the application for the preloader to actually have a purpose. By adding the images to the project and select Resource as Build Action the images will be included in the XAP-file. To show the images in the application, something of the following will do. XAML <Image Name="Card" Source="/SilverlightApplicatio...

The amazing game the Cornball is about to be ported to C#.NET. A project which is a lot easier than expected. The number of hours I put down so far is barely hitting two digits and still I have reached a playable alpha version. The source will be published in parts or in its entirety when I am finished, but until then there is one small problem I would like to show that required some extra thought. The class structure consists of Card and Deck, which inherits List<Card>. Deck has a Shuffle method which utilizes the Fisher-Yates  algorithm. public void Shuffle() { Random random = new Random(); for(int i = Count - 1; i >= 0; i--) { Swap(random.Next(i), i); } } internal void Swap(int fromIndex, int toIndex) { Card temp = this[fromIndex]; this[fromIndex] = this[toIndex]; this[toIndex] = temp; } In the middle of the game, only a part of the game should be re-shuffled, which renders this method useless. Long story short, I came up with ...

I started my programming career by modifying a guestbook written i Perl for one of my first web sites. When I took the step into the Windows platform the natural choice was the Win32 API and C. In my early teens I managed to create a couple of really interesting applications. When Google recently found a  web site  from 1999 for one of these applications I had to take a trip down the memory lane. I have now found two amazing application, written by me in my teens, which even seem to work pretty good on todays operating systems, including a 64-bit Windows 7. The applications are developed and tested for Windows 95/98 so there are no guarantee for the function on other platforms. What I can guarantee is that the applications are 100% free from any malware or other bad stuff. Text  is a revolutionary text editor focused on fancy word proceccing functions instead of unnecessary eye candy. The Cornball  is a solitaire game where the goal is to put the cards in order ...