wtrn's Q&A profile

• Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc. Alphablending 3D

  I know when doing alphablending you have to draw objects in order. I believe you must draw more distant objects first. I assume this distance from the camera. Can anyone point me in the right direction as far as implementing this I've actually read that and found it informative. However, I am interested in a full 3D approach. Note this: Since this is a 2.5D game, and the player has no control over the camera, I know that objects in the foreground will always be in the foreground, and the background objects will always be the background. So, I can just hardcode my objects’ draw order I'll look on GameDev and Gamasutra and the like and see if I can find anything. ...Show All

• Windows Forms Adding help to an application

  I have used HelpStudio lite to generate help content but I can't figure out how to add it to my application. The help keeps talking about adding / registering it to Visual Studio, but I just want it to be relevent to the application I am developing. How do I display the help window How do I get the help content being displayed to be the help content I produced Thanks, John When I try the following, I get an exception stating that there is no application for the file type. Process help = new Process (); string myDocumentsPath = Directory .GetCurrentDirectory(); help.StartInfo.FileName = myDocumentsPath + "\\Help\\Sudo.hxs" ; help.Start(); ...Show All

• Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc. Displaying textured 3D objects

  Hi there, I've been working my way through the tutorials at http://xna101.spaces.live.com/ , and I am stuck on lesson 16, the first 3D tutorial. The download of die.x didn't work, so I whipped up my own little 3D cube in Blender and applied a simple 64x64 pixel texture to it and saved it in DirectX format as cube.x. I was able to add it to my Project fine, but when I try to compile the program, it has all sorts of trouble understanding any texture I put on the thing. It will say the texture file is not found in the debug/bin directory; or it will give me other error messages about the structure of the texture file. I tried saving the cube as cube.3ds and cube.x3d and whatnot, and none of that worked. (Indeed, the Project didn't even rec ...Show All

• Visual Basic Upgrading from VS.NET 2003 to VS2005

  Hi all, i am currently in the process of upgrading a large scale VB.NET application from VS.NET 2003 to VS2005. I converted the code successfully and it is working fine. However, the issue i am having now is that there is so much new stuff, i.e. controls, features, etc., in VS2005 that i feel overwhelmed. I don't know how to go about taking advantage of all the new controls. Has anybody gone through the same problem and if so what did you do Any general advice on upgrading from 2003 to 2005 Thanks. This depends a lot on the type of application that you are trying to build. If you're looking for information on the new controls, check out the following link. It's a good overview of the new ...Show All

• .NET Development A problem in restarting the service of MSSQLSERVER

  I had the following problem in my application. I need to Restart MSSQLServer service before do the connection test. In some cases, I have to Restart the MSSQLSERVICE again after connection test. In the old version of MSDE2000, no problem occured at all. But in MSDE2000 SP3a, I got the following error when restart the MSSQLSERVICE for a 2nd time. But if I run the test program so as to execute RESTART and CONNECTIONTEST in pair each time, no error occured. Can somebody give some advice to avoid this problem Thank you! The error log says : 2007-01-11 10:30:26.45 server Using 'SSNETLIB.DLL' version '8.0.766'. 2007-01-11 10:30:26.46 spid5 Starting up database 'model'. 2007-01-11 10:30:26.51 server SQL server listening on ...Show All

• .NET Development Measure data-traffic per IP-adress

  I have a pc with a number of devices connected to it. They are all connected via an utp cable. All devices have their own IP-adress. Now I want to measure the traffic of this data. In this way I want to check wether there is activity at the device (scanner). So when the number of bytes during a certain period is below a certain value, it must start another process. This must be monitored per IP adress. I want to use C# code to make this work. It's not my goal to measury the connectivity, I've read several articles on that subject. It's really about the quantity of data. Other recommendations regarding this subject are welcome as well. Thanks in advance! I assume you mean "per remote ip-address". That is tough, you ...Show All

• SQL Server T-SQL Question

  I need to figure out how to write a stored procedure to get the correct daily AAbutter price for sales orders on a particular day. I am pretty confused...but I am just a beginner. First of all, a sales person will input a date (@Date) to obtain a correct daily butter price for that day. This will be the date that the order was received...so it doesn't always mean that it is the current date. They will also put in a customer number as well (@Cust_Num). We have a table that gives historical data for the daily AAButter price with the fields MktDate, Price. The catch is how we deligate the AAButter price to our customers. They are categorized in 3 ways: Daily Pricing, M-F Average, and Thursday-Wednesday Average (with no SATor Sun AAButterPr ...Show All

• Visual C# Windows 2000 SP for deployment

  I am creating a setup project (VS 2003) for a Windows application. I have to make sure that the application will be installed on Windows 2000 ONLY if Service Pack 4 is installed on the target machine. So, I am using a Launch Condition Editor and check for the VersionNT property...     well, at least I tried to do that. But I have no idea what value I should be comparing it to. Could someone give me a link to an article which has a list of all VersionNT property values for NT, 2000, and XP, please I need to know those values for SP3 and SP4 for Win2K... Thanks a lot! Registry key: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion   take a look at the entries there, one of which i ...Show All

• Windows Forms Windows Form Navigation Problem...

  Hi!!! I'm using C# to do my application. For example I have 2 Forms, created with buttons. When I run the application, and click the next button, it was supposed to lead me to the other form. I managed to achieve that by basically hiding the first form and showing the next. Example: Mainpage mp = new Mainpage(); this.hide(); mp.show(); However, when I click the next button I see the forms changing from my taskbar. I tried changing the for resolution of the form to 1024, 768 to have it become a full screen but still when it loads the other form, I am still able to see my desktop wallpaper. How do I link the forms in such a way it doesn't show me my wallpaper. h ...Show All

• SQL Server There was an error in the incoming SOAP request packet: Client, LoginFailure, AccessDenied

  Hello, I havent been able to consume an endpoint from my application. I have windows xp and I am logged in on my machine as LUCHO\Administrador. the code that I used to crate the endpoint was create endpoint MyEndPoint AUTHORIZATION [LUCHO\Administrador] state = STARTED AS HTTP ( path = '/sql/hello_world' , AUTHENTICATION =( INTEGRATED ), PORTS = ( CLEAR ), CLEAR_PORT = 90 , SITE = 'LOCALHOST' ) FOR SOAP ( WEBMETHOD 'GetSqlInfo' ( name = 'master.dbo.xp_msver' , SCHEMA = STANDARD ), WEBMETHOD 'DayAsNumber' ( name = 'master.sys.fn_MSdayasnumber' ), WSDL = DEFAULT , --SCHEMA = STANDARD, DATABASE = 'master' , NAMESPACE = 'http ...Show All

• SQL Server How to insert a new record (and get it's identity), if a record is not found

  What I'm trying to do is write a query (actually it will be a sub-query) that gets the ID of a record using a standard SELECT/WHERE, but if the record is not found then I want to insert a record and return the ID of the inserted record. So far I've got this (which doesn't work!) SELECT ISNULL (( Select ContactID AS ID FROM [TileManager] . [dbo] . [Contact] WHERE ( [Salutation] = 'Mrs' AND [Forename] = 'Freda' AND [Surname] = 'Bloggs' )), ( INSERT INTO [TileManager] . [dbo] . [Contact] ( [Salutation] , [Forename] , [Surname] ) VALUES ( 'Mrs' , 'Freda' , 'Bloggs' ); SELECT @@IDENTITY AS ID )) Any help would be greatly appreciated. I don't believe you can em ...Show All

• Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc. How to Disable Smoothing when scaling texture2d ?

  Hi, To start with xna, i've decided to make a simple chip8 emulator. The original window size is 64x32, so once the codes are interpreted and the screen is drawn in my chip8 class i call SetData() to draw everything on a single texture2d. The problem is that when i use the Scaling parameter all the pixels are smoothed... In another program this could be helpfull, but in this case it gives really ugly ... So hwo can i disable smoothing pixels when scaling a texture2d or, is there another way to render my screen (it's an int array of size 64*32) Thank you . You need to use SpriteSortMode.Immediate if you want to override any renderstate values. Otherwise, the SpriteBatch will do all the actual drawing (including sett ...Show All

• SQL Server Replication: periodic initial snapshot not yet available

  I have a push subscriprion (publisher sql2000, distributor 2005, subscriber sql2005) that periodically (twice per month) changes it's status to " ... initial snapshot not yet available ...". Then I need to mark it as for reinitialization and start the snapshot agent (starting the snapshot agent without marking it for reinitilization doesn't starts the subscription to initilize itself). There is nothing important in the logs. Any suggestion why this may happen The network connections between distributor and subscribers sometimes are broken (it's over VPN), but there is a couple of other replication that goes the same way and they are fine... Has anyone gotten anywhere with this one We're seeing the same issue with SQL 2k5 . ...Show All

• Visual C# Toolbars for Windows Taskbar in C#

  Hi all. Does anyone know how to make a Toolbar that would be located at Windows Taskbar (like language bar etc) Is there any tools for this in .NET, or do i have to take a deep dive in Win API I'd like to do a simple battery meter or something like that. I could of course use NotifyButtons, but a larger toolbar object would be cool looking. Thanks for any advice, AK I tried to look from codeproject but I had no idea that I had to look for "Desk Band". So thank you very much for info :) ...Show All

• Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc. JIT register allocation and bounds checking

  A few questions for Shawn or one of his buddies: 1/ Does the register allocator used in the XBox JITter use all of the available scalar floating point registers If not, how many can it deal with 2/ Does the XBox VM ever skip array bounds checking, and if so under what conditions 3/ Presumably there are no bounds checks when using unsafe code and pointers 4/ Are the method inlining limitations of the CF VM mentioned here still applicable to the XBox VM - especially the one about not inlining any method with floating point arguments or return values (yikes, that would be all floating point setters and getters!) Andy. Ryan, I'm sorry that you feel so upset that I said I found your pos ...Show All