Alan Phipps's Q&A profile

• Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc. How will it be the content creation for XNA??

  Hi people, I want to know if XNA will provide it's own tools for content creation, or what formats will it support (COLLADA, .X). And what about a GUI System, will it have one While XNA does have types for Model, Texture, and Effect. You can define your own objects and work with them, but this is still done through the content pipeline. It's done in a much different way then today, again look for my post later this week. Thanks! ...Show All

• Visual Studio 2008 (Pre-release) WCF and Java WS client

  How can I consume my WCF wsDualHttp-binding from a Java program Have you looked at this http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms730017.aspx ...Show All

• SQL Server Cannot open offline cube

  Hi, I created an offline cube file (.cub) using SSAS 2005 sp1. I tried to open the cube file by following these steps: 1. Open excel 2003. On the toolbar, click on Data and select PivotTable and PivotChart report . 2. Select External data source as the data you want to analyze then click on next. 3. Click on the Get Data button on the next step. 4. Choose the OLAP Cubes tab on the pop-up window, select <New Data Source> and Click OK. 5. Type "Sales" as the name of the data source. 6.Choose Microsoft OLE DB Provider for Analysis Services 9.0 as the OLAP provider. Click on Connect button 7. Select the cube file option and browse for the location of the cube file. Click Finish. 8. On the fourth step ...Show All

• Visual Studio 2008 (Pre-release) How To Get ParserContext?

  Currently I am writing a custom MarkupExtension, and I am running into an issue that I want to access all xml namespaces to clr namespaces mapping dictionary under ParserContext.XmlnsDictionary property, in the ProvideValue method I do something like this: ParserContext context = serviceProvider.GetService( typeof ( ParserContext )) as ParserContext ; if (context == null ) { throw new InvalidOperationException ( "ParserContext is null" ); } the code always run into an exception, so how can I reference the ParserContext within a MarkupExtension should I manually parse those mapping info myself Sheva Actually I am writing a MarkupExtension to enable the xaml to accept generic type, I've use IXamlTypeResolver to ...Show All

• SQL Server Flat File Connection manager throws error when a column gets added to the flat file

  Hi, I have a situation where a tab limited text file is used to populate a sql server table. The tab limited text file comes from a third party vendor. There are fixed number of columns we need to export to the sql server table. However the third party may add colums in the text file. Whenenver the text file has an added column (which we dont need to import) the build fails since the flat file connection manager does not create the metadata for it again. The problem goes away  where I press the button "Reset Columns" since it builds the metadata then. Since we need to build the tables everyday we cannot automate it using SSIS because the metadata does not change automatically. Is there a way out in SSIS ...Show All

• Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc. Quaternion Tutorial

  Could someone school me in using Quaternions in XNA I'd love to have a tutorial specfically for XNA. I read a tutorial that helped me to understand them a bit better, but still not sure how to plug it into the game. If you can believe it, the documentation doesn't explain it to well. I made a small change to your code sample BlueG and it seemed to smooth things out a bit....... Matrix rotMat = Matrix .CreateFromQuaternion(_playerRot); Vector3 right = Vector3 .Transform( Vector3 .Right, rotMat); Vector3 up = Vector3 .Transform( Vector3 .Up, rotMat); Vector3 back = Vector3 .Transform( Vector3 .Backward, rotMat); Quaternion rot = Quaternion .CreateFromAxisAngle(right, pitch) ...Show All

• SQL Server What happens at midnight ?

  Everyday at just gone midnight, my MSSQL server won't accept connections. About 25 minutes later, it seems to be OK. There's no third party backup software running on this machine which is MSSQL server aware. Has anyone any suggestions as to why this might be happening The client app trying to use the db reports 17/10/2006 00:02:04 Email2DBServer Cannot open database "Email2DB" requested by the login. The login failed. From OpenLocalDatabase and there's an entry in the event log Event Type: Failure Audit Event Source: MSSQL$EMAIL2DB Event Category: (4) Event ID: 18456 Date: 17/10/2006 Time: 00:02:04 User: NAVIGATOR-BATH\navigator-service Computer: NAVIGAT2A Description: Login failed for user 'NAVIGATOR-BATH\navigator ...Show All

• .NET Development ConnectionString as app.config value

  In Visual Studio 2003/.net framework 1.1, I could use the designer of a component class to create an SqlConnection and then set the DynamicProperties of this object to use a config file key (app or web.config). I can't find this option in Visual Studio 2005 when working with an SqlConnection object in a designer. Do I have to get this value from the config file by coding now The designer should be automatically adding connection string entries to the application config file. Did you look for the connectionStrings section ...Show All

• Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc. Managed Direct3D 10

  Since XNA only supports DirectX 9.0 Where is Managed Direct3D 10 I hope there will be Managed wrapper for Direct3D 10 thanks You’re right in saying that there isn’t that much we could do that you can’t – but we are interested in doing an official version of MDX10 and we’re currently researching our options. What we’re looking to do is have parity with the native APIs as much as possible to ensure developers have the same power in .NET as they do in native. Stay tuned for updates, betas, news… It’s important to note that unless you want D3D10 specific features (for which there’s no hardware available yet) XNA Express is an excellent option for game development. The amount of s ...Show All

• Visual FoxPro Expression Builder

  Hi, just a quick question on Expression Builder. I have a few Read-only textboxes on a form. The values of these textboxes are populated via a local view. Values can be either .NULL. or strings. I would like to change the DisabledBaclColor property to red when the values are NOT .NULL. I tried to use the following statement in the Expression Builder of the DisabledBaclColor property but it doesn't work. IIF(IsNULL(This.Value), This.DisabledBackColor = 16777215, This.DisabledBackColor = 8421631) The error message was "Data Type is invalid for this property". Any ideas/suggestions/comments will be deeply appreciated. Thank you, Danny. >> IIF(IsNULL(This.Value), Thi ...Show All

• Visual Studio 2008 (Pre-release) Unable to open IChannelListener

  I'm trying to use the WCF adapter for BizTalk (I know this isn't supported by MS) and I'm getting an exception when I try to start the receive location: The Messaging Engine failed to add a receive location "News Receiver" with URL "wcf://http://localhost:13000/eventsource" to the adapter "WCF". Reason: "The ChannelDispatcher at 'http://localhost:13000/eventsource' with contract(s) '"IndigoOneWayReceiver"' is unable to open its IChannelListener.". That sounds like a pretty specific WCF exception but so far I'm unable to figure out what the problem is. Any ideas -- Bryant I've dug into the code a little to try and uncover what is really going ...Show All

• Windows Live Developer Forums MSN Messenger Code

  I was told it is possible to get code for MSN Messenger for my Master's thesis. Could anybody tell me how much is available and where to get it Peter, stop doing that. You are not answering questions here, only spamming around your own component, which hardly anybody needs. It's ok to spam that url once or so, because some people might like it. But you post it at every question that has some connections with it, but people will not use it. I am not interested in that component, and other users appearently neither, because nobody responds to you. So please stop that because it is quite annoying! ...Show All

• Smart Device Development Get network connection notification.

  If there such a thing as the possibility of getting a notification to your application that the PocketPC now has a network connection This is for a Today Plugin application and I don't want to sit there with the code trying to connect every so often as that seems like a waist of resources/processor. There has to be a better way. Thanks NotifyAddrChange can be used to detect changes in IP addresses assigned to a device - this would normally occur when device gets connected. On WM5 you can use Service and Notification Broker (snapi.h) to request notifications on change of such values as ConnectionsCount or ConnectionsNetworkCount ...Show All

• Silverlight (formerly WPF/E) Windows SideBar

  Is it possible to run WPF/E in a Windows SideBar Gadget I was hoping to build a demo of a SideBar Gadget that plays video, but I can't even get a basic WPF/E file to render in the SideBar. Thanks! I don't know how Sidebar is hosting hte HTML, but I have a question over there to try and and make sense of the problem. In the example I posted, I had to embed the XAML in the HTML to make it work so it looks like all file access to the WPF/E host is a problem. The known issue with videos needing to be from the same protocol (e.g. http if the page is http, https if the page is https, file if the page is file) is something I think they're working on, but probably isn't the problem here since XAML source and im ...Show All

• Visual C# Error Trapping in C#.NET

  My question my seem extremely trivial, but I was wondering if somebody can explain what exactly is meant by theError Trapping construct in C#.NET or rather what sort of Errors does it catch and what differences are there between the Error Trapping construct of C#.NET and a typical try{}catch{} statement. Any conceptual clarification will be hugely appreciated. try {} Catch {} blocks does exactly what it kind of states. it will try to execute some code in the try {} block and if there are any errors produced/raised from any code within that block, it will go to the catch {} block to check to see if the exception is implemented/catched and once it finds that there is an exception which is to be expected i ...Show All