ludovic
Xaml serialization quirks and gotchas
I recently had to build a little tool that would read its configuration from a XAML file (because XAML serialization is, most of the time, better and more customizable than standard XML serialization). The trick was that this tool had to be built on top of .NET 3.0 – not 3.5 or 4.0. And I [...]
Spam your friends with Yahoo! Pipes
You know how it goes: you’re an internet hipster with blogs and Twitter feeds and all that kind of new age stuff, but only other internet hipsters read them. Your friends (at least the ones that are not internet hipsters) only stick to Facebook. So how can you bring your stuff to them?
At first, it [...]
About unit testing Maya and MStatus macros
Programmers in the video games and movies industry rarely write unit tests for all kinds of reasons and excuses, but every now and then, it happens. And it can get a bit complicated when you want to test a plug-in hosted by a 3rd party application like Autodesk’s Maya.
Setting up the unit test project
The good [...]
Writing a custom Main() method for WPF applications
Creating a new WPF project in Visual Studio gives you the following pretty simple application markup and code:
<Application x:Class="WpfApplication2.App"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
StartupUri="Window1.xaml">
</Application>
namespace WpfApplication2
{
public partial class App : Application
{
}
}
Understanding how it really works, and how [...]
Consolidate instant messaging accounts into your Gmail
Everybody knows that Gmail is great for consolidating multiple email accounts into one place that’s easy to search, organize, backup, and get out of. What less people know is that it’s also a great place to consolidate your instant messenger accounts, too!
Watch out, this article is pretty long and gets quite nerdy at the end.
Some [...]
Visual Studio Express’ limitations lead to bad practices
Visual Studio Express only has a subset of what you can find in Visual Studio Professional, which makes complete sense, but two missing features actually prevent users from following best programming practices in my opinion. The whole point of Express is to let enthusiasts and students discover the joys of programming – so we might [...]
My home media & entertainment setup
I was working on this article when I spotted that my friend Bertrand Le Roy posted on that very same subject so I’ll turn this into a reply to his. The new year seems like a good time for bragging about one’s home video setup, it seems.
First, you may notice that my setup is quite [...]
Exposing global variables in IronPython
Lately I’ve been playing around a bit with IronPython and how to embed it inside an application to add scripting features. I’m still figuring things out, but I had a hard time exposing global variables to the Python environment.
The idea was to expose a couple of .NET objects (mainly a few important managers/singletons from the [...]
Some more contacts love
There’s been a lot of improvement in communications in the past few years, from better services to brand new ones, but I still feel like contact management is lagging behind. I mean, isn’t it important to be able to find how to contact somebody in the first place?
Here are a few things I think could [...]
Fun with jQuery: the vertical “Coda” slider
I recently published the new version of my personal website and you’ll have no problem figuring out that I had some fun with jQuery. Probably a bit too much fun, actually, but hey, a personal website is supposed to be just usable enough that you can contact the owner without hassle.
My first approach to the [...]