Chris Ghali's Q&A profile

• Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc. your first game!

  Hi, just wanted to express my views on the 'my first game' section... guys, this is a waste of time. please don't do things like this in future. it explains nothing, it teaches nothing. it just lets me copy and past a load of code and then marvel at what the program does. you may as well just give us the file and say look what we did. It's not all negative. the tutorials on visualbasic express were wonderful. I couldn't believe at how insightful they were. is this done by the same people well thats my feelings on that anyway. if your gonna do any kind of tutorial, take some tips off the visual basic ones. and if your gonna ask us to copy and paste code, make it small chunks, and describe what the commands are doing. othe ...Show All

• Smart Device Development Call VB external function from a DLL

  Hi, I've developed a C++ DLL that process incoming SMS messages and an EXE VB application that run as a standard program. How can I call a specific function of EXE VB program from the DLL I'm trying to develop an SMS filter that receive only messages that come from a specific phone numbers. DLL (MAPIRule) intercept SMS message, call VB program function that check if the phone number is good and return a value to DLL. Thanks a lot http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/843s5s5x.aspx ...Show All

• Visual Studio Express Editions Noob Frustration

  Hey all, You are probably tired of me and this issue.  I can understand that.  But this is becoming frustrating.  First, I want to thank all those that have helped me so far.  I know that this is probably a HUGE noob thing that you all can do in your sleep.  I, however, am becoming very frustrated with it. I understand the use of OpenFileDialog, SaveFileDialog. I understand that the use of RTF methods (LoadFile and SaveFile)would be better, but I want to understand how Notepad performs its function. I think that StreamWriter is likely what I want to use but I am meeting with great frustration in attempting to use it. What is I want to do I want to know how to use Save that is used within Notepa ...Show All

• Software Development for Windows Vista What happened to the HelpDeskSupport sample app in .NET RC1 and WinWF CTP5?

  Dear all, The HelpDeskSupport sample was in the SDK up until Beta 2.2, but it seems to have vanished. It looks like it exists on the web, but the links to the source code from the documentation are broken. I used it to obtain classes for "simple" communication between asp.net and a state machine workflow. This seemed to work ok, so I didn't look into it to any degree, but under RC1, using manual scheduling, it crashes because the communication interface uses a class global static to keep track of the DataPipeList and this does not persist across re-starts. The idea of a class that abstracts to data pipes with defined message formats is a good one, although the implementation of it here is a bit clumsy. Is there a samp ...Show All

• Visual Studio 2008 (Pre-release) Error in svcutil

  Hi all, I successfully created a simple service hosted in the managed application (console application) or can be called a self-hosted service. Now w hen i create the proxy for service using svcutil its says " Error: An unexpected error has occurred in the tool. Error: Method not found: 'System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2<System.String, System.ServiceModel.Channels.Binding> System.ServiceModel.Configuration.Metadata Element.LoadMetadataExchangeBindings()'. " And SDK is not installing in my machine. it shows "Debugger error" while installing. So, i just copied the files under Microsoft SDKs in c:\program files and pasted in my system's c:\program files. I came to know that there is programm ...Show All

• Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc. How can I directly stop drawing a pixel?

  Maybe it's a very essential question but... Which is the statement in the pixel shader to stop drawing a pixel Stopping it that way would have any negative effect Thanks OK. Ive not tried this at all, so this is just off the top of my head ;) OK, so if you are followinf the example in my previous post, we are rendering the output to the x component of our depth texture. Now if we change the texture to a format that supports more channels (You'll have to excuse me as I'm at work atm, with very little access to documentation - Vector2 texture maybe ), we could always store some more interesting values in the y,z, or w parts of the texture. So say for example we are rendering our depth textur ...Show All

• Visual C++ MultiThreading

  Hi, I'm new to Visual c++ and am currently making one of my first programs. I'm trying to use the CCriticalSection and CSingleLock classes in this program, and to do so, I know I need to include <afxmt.h>. Well, when I try to compile my program for debug, I get all kinds of errors like this: I duno why I get them, but if some1 could please help me fix the problem, I would greatly appreciate it. ------ Build started: Project: Dales Name Genz0r Beta, Configuration: Debug Win32 ------ Compiling... stdafx.cpp C:\Program Files\Microsoft Platform SDK\Include\mfc\afxv_w32.h(194) : error C3641: 'DrawState' : invalid calling convention '__stdcall ' for function compiled with /clr:pure or /clr:safe C:\Program Files\Micros ...Show All

• SQL Server Does anyone know of a web based SQL Query tool?

  Hi I want to be able t give my users access to our SQL server database via a eb application published o our web server. I have found one freeware tool but it only supports SQL Server 2000 and the developer doesn't returns any emails. Has anyone come across a web ui SQL query tool either freeware or one that can be purhcase thanks for your help Marcus Do you just want to have a tool sending out a query from a textbox and getting the results back in a grid or something Or do you want tome graphical designer for your users HTH, Jens K. Suessmeyer. --- http://www.sqlserver2005.de --- ...Show All

• SQL Server Table Inheritance

  Hi, I am running SQL SERVER 2005 Enterprise Edition under Windows 2003 server. I would like to use table hierarchies (inheritance) in SQL 2k5 just as we do it in informix,PosgresSQL and other databases. Can we do the same in SQL 2k5 also If yes, then  how Thanks I may not understand your question - if by "table hierarchies" you mean tree-like information, you can find out more here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/248915 But if you mean "inheritance" to say "cascades", then you can learn more here: http://www.mssqlcity.com/Articles/General/using_constraints.htm I think you mean the inheritance that DB2 does, which allows a single table to propagate its prop ...Show All

• Visual Basic run application in back ground

  hi all i have prepared an application which dose not take any user input and the aim of the application is to take screenshots at a regular interval of 5 min i am using vb.net 2005 for this i have taken a form and in that form i have placed a timer control and in timer trick i am calling the function which takes the screen shot my requirement is to set up this application and this should run in the back ground and the user should not be able to cancel or stop the running of the application can any one suggest me how to do this the application should run in the background it self and this should start when ever the system boots this is showing a following exception of "the handle is invalid" when i start th ...Show All

• SQL Server Qns on SQL Express Database

  Hi Is it possible to blank/null out all the data in a specific table in the database, executed in a button click event Thats quite easy: TRUNCATE TABLE ownerorschema.TableName and you should be done. HTH, Jens K. Suessmeyer. --- http://www.sqlserver2005.de --- ...Show All

• Visual Studio Express Editions bytes to ints

  I have a computer than will be sending out an array of 16 bit integers via UDP broadcast, but the UDPClient appears to only accept a byte array. A conversion is in order. I found another thread on this: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx PostID=156941&SiteID=1 where the writer made a class with a bunch of definitions. For a guy without a lot of class (pun intended, seriously), I found that code difficult to read so I wrote the following snippet. I was going to ask if there is an easy way to convert from bytes to integers. (If we can only receive bytes, and certainly there are times when integers need to be sent, there should be a standard function to do this.) I wrote some code to make my conversion. Lines 01 and 0 ...Show All

• Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc. Here we go!!

  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx familyid=21e979e3-b8ae-4ea6-8e65-393ea7684d6c&displaylang=en Just.. wow Downloading.. Thanks to everybody who brought us this ...Show All

• Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc. Textures don't show up when using Basiceffect

  Hi, I'm just trying to create a couple of walls and apply a texture to them. Unfortunately, when running the program the walls just come out as a grey sort of colour (depending on the texture, the shade of grey seems to change). I'm assuming there's something obvious I'm missing, so I'm hoping someone can help me out. Here's snippets of code handling the basiceffect: //In loadgraphicscontent: Texture2D wallTexture = content.Load<Texture2D>("Content\\Textures\\em2"); theWalls = new Walls(wallTexture); wallEffect = new BasicEffect(graphics.GraphicsDevice, null); //wallEffect.DiffuseColor = theWalls.TheColor.ToVector3(); wallEffect.TextureEnabled = true; wallEffect.Texture = theWalls.WallTexture; w ...Show All

• .NET Development HASHTABLE to store 2 different types in HASHTABLE collections

  I want to store each datarow in to each HashTable, how can I do that basically.>> datReader = sqlCmd.ExecuteReader(); int i = 0; System.Collections. Hashtable [] myHT = null ; while (datReader.Read()) { myHT = new System.Collections. Hashtable (); myHT .Add( "PKid" , datReader[ "SomeDataFromAColumn" ]); i+=1; } Also. Can I be able to store two diffent types (classes) into this Hashtable without GetHashCode(). like, Class1 object1 = new Class1(); Class2 object2 = new Class2(); myHT .Add( 1,object1); myHT .Add(2 ,object2); Use the generic Dictionary object for your hash table work. For example say one has a string as the key, but a li ...Show All