Configuring Relationships with the Fluent API

Reminder to self to look at the MSDN Magazine June Issue when it comes out.
  Windows Azure Insider gets you up to speed on concepts and principles behind multi-tenant applications...

A useful web developer tool from Google.

Get Mobile

It allows you to test and score a web-site on its mobile readiness. This blog score's 6 out of 6, which is all donwn to Google. The last web-site I built (some years ago) only scores 2 out of 6. An indication of how the times keep changing.

CSS links:

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time.

W3C CSS Validator

Minify your CSS

Zen Garden

An excellent site for 3D tutorials, AeroTwist

I had heard of Microsoft BizSpark before but never really looked into it. It is surprising to see how many entrepreneurs have been supported by it.

There is an interactive map showing companies set up by people on the programme which is fun to browse around. Some of the companies look to have been going for a while, others have not got going yet.

More about BizSpark

Having used the Beekeeping App at the hives today I realised two things.

Firstly, it was incredibly useful to be able to look at the previous hive inspections, just to know what state the hive was in on the last visit, because it is difficult to remember the details, even with only four hives

 And, secondly, there is a lot more detail that I would like to be able to record, on diseases and treatments, configuration of the hive and more.

With more information collected it would be possible to automatically analyse the data and come up with suggestions as to what might need doing. It would also be possible, with the data being in the cloud to analyse information from multiple beekeepers, and provide insight into the health of bees nationally.

I think this has a lot of potential and I'm going to redesign the app and get it to a state where others can use it.

A Microsoft book on Developing Multi-tenant Applications for the Cloud. 246 pages, free to download. This is so much better than having to buy those paper things.

Dino Esposito has an article on Social Authentication in ASP.NET MVC 4 in this month's MSDN Magazine.

This was the article on OAuth that shows how to authenticate with facebook / twitter...

It is almost too easy to add OAuth authentication and authorization with Facebook, or Twitter to an MVC 4 Internet application. Include the commented out lines in the AuthConfig.cs file and add your facebook appId and appSecret and the job is done.

The only difficulty I had with this was down to a NuGet package that was not up to date. Click the update button and NuGet solves it for you. Microsoft are really making this easy.

Having fun with Windows Azure and ASP.NET MVC 4...

My Bee Hive Inspection app is coming along nicely. It is remarkably easy to create a web based data driven app, put it in the cloud and access it from your mobile phone...

XNA 2d animation

Added animation to pieces. They now glide from one square to another smoothly. At the start of the animation I make a note of the game time, so I know when the animation started. I add a second to calculate when it should end. Then I get the x and y coordinates of the start and end positions.

Then later on, in the display function, work out how far the piece should have moved between the start and end points given the current game time and display a piece at that location.

When the animation starts I make the call to move the piece so I have to display over the destination square with a sprite to show one fewer pieces than are actually there until the animation ends, when the moving piece arrives at it's destination.

The animation takes the same length of time no matter how far the piece is going to move, and the movement is linear, there is no easing into and out of the move. I am developing on a netbook, and I think the animation would be smoother on a desktop, but it looks pretty good.

XNA, the fun bit

I worked on improving the graphics, creating help screens, realising that twiddling with images could extend indefinitely, so have made a list of things to change and will stop when it looks good enough. Also decided that I really must add some animation of pieces so that they glide from one position to another rather than teleporting.

Changing the rules

I played a few games and realised I wanted to change the rules. Instead of capturing the opponents pieces you can send them back to their start square. This improves the game play enormously, but does mean that the weightings I generated earlier are all invalid.

XNA game

I hooked up the existing code to generate the computer's move and make it.

There are still no delays yet, so after your turn the dice get rolled and the move is made instantly, then the dice are rolled again instantly and it's your turn. I need to think of a way to introduce a delay, possibly even an animation to move the pieces smoothly and give the human player a chance to appreciate what is happening.

Highlighting moves

I added highlighting to show the square you are hovering over and the square the piece would move to with the current dice. To do this I am using PNG files with transparent backgrounds as follows

Background



Piece



Highlight

Put it all together



and for the destination cell

Background + Highlight

These only show up if there is a legal move for the piece hovered over using the current dice.

To display them I am adding them to a spriteBatch:

// start collecting sprites
spriteBatch.Begin();
...// where to display the sprite
Vector2 tempVector = new Vector2(x, y);
// display piece (a Texture2D)
spriteBatch.Draw(piece, tempVector, Color.White);
...
// finished collecting sprites
spriteBatch.End();

That's all it takes to display a 2D board game, lots of sprites displayed in the right place. Not too difficult.

Moving pieces

I captured the mouse position and added the ability to select a piece to move, checking, of course, that it was a legal move.

This was easy to add as all the game logic for deciding legality of moves already existed in the console app. This was partly why I wanted to get the game play sorted out in a console app before trying to tackle XNA.

Searching the rainforests

If you have been using Bing or Yahoo for search, consider using Ecosia instead.

It's a search engine created by the WWF in conjunction with Yahoo and Bing. It has the advantage that most of the money taken from advertising goes to protect the rainforest. According to the search page they have already managed to protect 108,000 square yards. The more people use the search engine the faster that figure will grow.

Obviously, it isn't enough and what is really needed is for Governments to act. I know small changes are not enough, but it is time to do whatever we can.

XNA Conference

Tomorrow is the first XBLIGUK conference in Birmingham, for XNA developers. I am not going to be there, but I hope it is a success and that it is the first of many. The agenda looks very promising.