XNA Streaming – Part 2

In part one of this article, I did an overview of the XNA Streaming project. In this part I’m going to describe the File Transfer Service. The main responsibility of the File Transfer Service is to provide access to streamable games. The service stores the game files in a database table, together with their relative file paths. This way the file system structure can be recreated when downloading the game.

XNA Streaming – Part 1

Introduction As I mentioned in my previous post, at this year’s Microsoft Community Bootcamp I entered in the demo competition together with Adi. We’ve had some issues in the past with (cheap) broadcasting of presentations. There are plenty of professional tools out there that accomplish this goal, but that’s not my point. My point is that I have not yet found a cheap (free) utility that will allow me to

Microsoft Community Bootcamp v5

During 11.09.2008 and 14.09.2008 I attended the fifth annual event dedicated to Microsoft professionals from the industry and academic environment. I also attended last year and wrote a bit about the experience here. A change from last year’s event was the fact that this year, the professionals invited were almost as many as MSPs (until now,  only a handful of MVPs had been invited). The location was Vatra Dornei. Possibly

Creating a Vista Sidebar Gadget Using Microsoft Silverlight

Introduction Some while ago I did a post on how to create a Vista Sidebar gadget using JavaScript. I also mentioned that I tried to create the gadget using XBAP or Silverlight, but due to the limitations in those technologies at that time, I decided that I had to give up on too much of the Sidebar gadget specific functionality (flyouts, cross domain data retrieval). More than 6 months have

Auto Complete for Textboxes in WPF

Introduction It is very common when entering a search string in a textbox to get a small list of valid search results that match the search string entered so far. This feature is called auto complete and it has been widely used in web pages and desktop applications alike. From the developer’s point of view, the auto complete feature has been implemented as part of the TextBox control in Windows

Managing "Global Constants" with a Database

Introduction There always comes a time while developing an application when a programmer has to introduce some “constants”. These may be Id’s, names, time intervals. The first action is to just put the literal constant where it’s needed first. Once the value of the constant is needed in additional places, a decision has to made: where to store the “constant”. The really bad answer would be to just reuse the