The biggest feature of course if the ability to create games and distribute them through Xbox Live Community Games.

Remember, as a student you can get access to XNA Game Studio free of charge through DreamSpark!

Luke
UWA MSP

Touchless allows you to create Multi-Touch applications, simply by using your webcam to detect movement.

The Touchless SDK team have also got a demo to download to show this off.

I’d love to see a whole bunch of Touchless apps coming from Australia students.

Luke
UWA MSP

http://twitter.com/ekulmi

• The Keynote started with a general TechEd collaboration video that emphasised MSDN and TechNet as community oriented sites
• Afterwords there were quick words from Tracy Fellows head of Microsoft in Australia, intKeyroducing the keynote speaker
• The Keynote speaker was Amit Mital lead (and one of the founders) of the Live Mesh team. He showed a video that emphasised connectivity between al devices (think tv, mobile, house (alarms, door locks), computers) via the cloud. So much so, that when a laptop gets destroyed in the movie the main actor gets a different machine and loads it up with his info and gets his own desktop back.
• Dr. Niel got up and demoed two instances of software + Services (the current mantra from Microsoft, emphasising a move to the cloud). He also “let slip” and showed off Live Mesh on his mobile (this was live, not recorded), by syncing photos between his mobile and laptop.

Photo Goodness:

Stay tuned for more!

As usual there’ll be heaps of free giveaways and aawesome prizes to pick up – so make sure to stay tuned for more details!

Got suggestions? Questions? Anything else? Feel free to leave a comment below…

Group Shot solves this by allowing you to select the “good parts” (i.e. all those open eyes) of all the images and then joining everything together into one final shot. You can use this to make sure that everyone in that family shot is looking at the camera, and that those unwanted photobombers are history!

Check out the example (and tutorial) or go straight to Group Shot for a download.

It’s exam period as well, so Good Luck to all, and stay tuned for exciting happenings coming to a University near you!

What do I get with DreamSpark?

DreamSpark currently contains:

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional
• Windows Server 2003 Standard Version
• Expression Studio
• XNA Game Studio 2.0 (+ Creators Club)

So what’s so great about DreamSpark you ask?

Yup, you get all the software it comes with via MSDN-AA anyway – but there are two big differences:

1. The license is unencumbered so you can use it for profit
2. XNA Creators Club! Perfect for those with Xboxs (and Zunes soon) the Creators Club grants you access to exclusive content and the ability to develop and debug games directly on the Xbox (but you already know that of course, because you attended game camp!)

It’s nice to (finally) see DreamSpark make it’s way down South – we’ll keep you posted as more information roles in!

One day I was given the task of looking up the historial share prices of stocks. Given the number of stocks, this wasn’t going to be a nice job, as I would have had to lookup each stock individually.

Another problem that existed was all the major finance websites that have historical data often get it wrong. Just plain wrong. I’ve found errors with Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, etc, etc.

So to do this job, I made a little .NET program called StockPrice.

Using Visual Studio 2008 I was able to very quickly (about an hour) come up with a multi-threaded program that grabbed historial prices from 3 major sites and compared them to each other, giving what it thinks is the most likely price on that day. Further more, Visual Studio 2008 allows me to OneClick publish the program for automatic updates and installation from the web.

If you are interested, please download it and take a look. I am very interested in any feedback you may have. I am happy to support it to an extent at http://forum.wamsp.com.au.

You can check it out at http://www.tidesoft.com.au/stockprice

Please note: The way Google Finance displays historical stock prices for ASX stocks is not consistent. Thus, often the Google price will be out by a day. Be sure to check the date returned on each source.

Luke
MSP (UWA)

One of the biggest issues for me is keeping track of each site. Stuff like:

• Is each site updated to the latest WordPress version?
• Is each plugin on each site updated the latest version?
• What plugins are installed on each site?
• What configurations are on each site?

In addition, updating each site to the latest versions of first WordPress and then each plugin is a huge time eater.

What multiple site Admins such as myself need is a single, simple management interface that remotely retrieves information from each site and displays it in a dashboard style interface. In addition, the ability to push out changes, such as updates would really be the peak of multiple site management.

After some thought, I believe wordpress.org would be the best place to host this utility. Admins could login to wordpress.org with their wordpress login, and immediately see aggregate information of their wordpress hosted blogs. In addition, they would be able to add non-hosted blogs, and includes those in the aggregate.

Each blog information could be collected via a password protected RSS style feed. This feed could be turned on or off (default as off) in the options section of each blog.

The simpler the better. Eg. It could be as simple as a table such as:

You could click on each blog to drill down or update, etc.

Rather than actually write the update module, the application could be set to simply “trigger” backups, updates, that were included in plugins, or if wordpress release official modules.

This idea could be extended to no end. Features such as the ability to write a single post and have it published to each of your sites would be good. Perhaps for events such as server maintenance.

Any thoughts? Please comment!

Luke
MSP (UWA)

Singularity is a Microsoft Research project involving the creation of a new Operating System based on an abstract instruction set and type safe languages (i.e. it’s based on .NET). The OS uses a concept of SIPs (Software-Isolated Processes) to load and control processes which are limited into their own address space. Due to the managed nature of the running code, programs can be verified by the OS at install time, runtime or during any other controlled interaction.

The source code download weighs in at 61MB (it’s a zip file with all of the sources and build scripts) – small enough to warrant a quick look. Check it out – you never know, your next OS course may just happen to be based on Singularity!

Goto to our forum to post more questions here.

The first thing that you will need to do is go and download the MySQL connector for .NET from here. Now, once we have that installed we can start coding. I’m not going to write and entire .NET sample application, instead, I will show you the code that you will need to use to connect to the two types of databases.

Second thing to do is to make sure we have all of our using statements (imports for VB.NET), we should have the following for MySQL integration:

using MySql.Data;
using MySql.Data.MySqlClient;

These for Microsoft SQL Server

using System.Data;
using System.Data.SqlClient;

Now because we want to make this usable for MS SQL and MySQL, we need one more further namespace to be used.

using System.Data.Common;

The System.Data.Common namespace contains all our generic data access classes that MySQL and MS SQL adapters derive from. Now we have our using statements for the data access components, we can start writing code the connect to these databases and start executing queries.

First thing we will do is create our basic types. We do this as follows:

DbConnection myDataConnection;
DbCommand myDataCommand;
DbReader myDataReader;

As these are abstract data type, we do not construct objects of them.

The next step is to connect to the database. We are going to set this up so it will attempt to connect to a MySQL database, but fail-over to a MS SQL database if the MySQL database is not found. Finally, if neither database is connected too, it will report an error.

try
{
myDataConnection = new MySqlConnection(“Data Source=myserver;Database=mydatabase;User Id=dbuser;Password=dbuserpass”);
myDataConnection.Open();
}
catch(MySqlException e)
{
try
{
myDataConnection = new SqlConnection(“Data Source=mssqlserver;Inital Catalog=database;User Id=username;Password=userpassword”);
myDataConnection.Open();
}
catch(SqlException e)
{
System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show(“No database could be connected!”);
}
}

It’s a simple as that. This code will attempt to connect to a MySQL database and if for any reason it fails, it will attempt to connect to a MS SQL database. If neither is connected, it will tell the user.

Now for the command object. This is used to execute a command and is used in conjunction with the data reader, which access the information that has been retrieved from the database.

The base object that we will use is the DbDataReader and DbCommand. Again, these are abstract classes and as such we do not create instances of them directly, but assign them instances of MySqlDataReader/MySqlCommand or SqlDataReader/SqlCommand.

We are going to expand our current code to allow for the these to be executed with in the current try blocks for each database type. This will mean that if any part of connecting, retrieving or processing the data fails, the program will attempt to perform the process on the other database.

So how do we execute a query? We use a database command. Now a command can be made for many purpose, SQL queries, Stored Procedures, MDX queries for MSSQL2K5 and the like. The first thing we need to do is know what type of command we are executing. There 3 main types, Query, Non-Query and Scalar. We will be using a query, which will return to us a DataReader object. A non-query is query that does not return a result, such as a standalone insert or update or delete. A scalar returns the first column of the first row as an object and no other data.

So we execute our query by using something similar too:

myDataReader = myDataCommand.ExecuteQuery(“SELECT * FROM test”);

So lets put it in practice!

try
{
myDataConnection = new MySqlConnection(“Data Source=myserver;Database=mydatabase;User Id=dbuser;Password=dbuserpass”);
//Create our data command using the connection
myDataCommand = (DbCommand) new MySqlCommand(myDataConnection);
myDataReader = (DbDataReader) myDataCommand.ExecuteQuery(“SELECT * FROM test”);
}
catch(MySqlException e)
{
try
{
myDataConnection = new SqlConnection(“Data Source=mssqlserver;Inital Catalog=database;User Id=username;Password=userpassword”);
//Create our data command using the connection
myDataCommand = (DbCommand) new SqlCommand(myDataConnection);
myDataReader = (DbDataReader) myDataCommand.ExecuteQuery(“SELECT * FROM test”);
}
catch(SqlException e)
{
System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show(“No database could be connected!”);
}
}

So that’s basically it! The program will connect to the database and execute a query and give us a dbDataReader object back. Now, finally, we need to use the data reader object, and this really is quite simple so long as you know 2 things. The ordinal (or index, base 0) of the item you want to retrieve, and the data type of the item. To iterate through the result set, we use dbDataReader.NextResult() or dbDataReader.Read(), I believe they do the exact same but I’m not 100% sure.

So the code to use it is as follows. I’ve also added in an extra check to make sure that there is data in the result, otherwise we get messy exceptions that need to be dealt with. This way is much easier.

if(myDataReader.HasRows)
{
while(myDataReader.NextResult())
{
System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show(String.Format(“Column1(text): {0}, Column2 (integer): {1}”, myDataReader.GetString(0), myDataReader.GetInt32().ToString()));
}
}

And that is it! Everything we were going to cover! So know you know how to create a program that will connect to both a MySQL and a MSSQL server or one or the other. We’ve also looked at how to use the ExecuteQuery() of the dbCommand object and also how to use the results of a query by using a dbDataReader object.

If you have any other questions. Then post them in the forum! And we will get back to you!

For now…

Cheers,

Allan
MSP Curtin
MCP
MCDST
MCAD (Exams Pending)

Visit www.imaginecup.com today!

The AJAX Control Toolkit is the fastest way to produce awesome AJAX styled website in ASP .NET. It’s as simple as drag and drop the control on the webform, wire it up in properties and you have AJAX functionality.

If you haven’t already checked it out I suggest you have a look asap.

The team have released a new version, which adds two new controls ListSearch and Slideshow and numerous bug fixes.

You can get the update from http://www.codeplex.com/AtlasControlToolkit/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=1425

Luke
MSP (UWA)