Opinions, tips, and news orbiting Microsoft
Welcome to The Xamarin Show Snack Pack Edition. A Snack Pack is bite sized episode that is focused on a specific topic and covered in just a few minutes. Today, we take a look at how to manage and upgrade your Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms b… Continue reading Snack Pack 15: Upgrading to Xamarin.Forms to .NET Standard | The Xamarin Show
I have to wonder just how many applications have used the Cards.DLL over the years. Hundreds? Thousands? It’s the Hello World for any card related game…
Calvin Hsia recently blogged about it and using it in a modern WPF app (Modern compared to how he blogged about it in 2004, Displaying playing cards for bridge, written in Visual FoxPro… 😉
Since the DLL is no longer shipped with Windows, he even provides a OneDrive download for it too… 🙂
Display Playing cards in WPF
I remember each version of Windows had new games. On Windows 3.1 many people played Solitaire. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 introduced Hearts. Somewhere along the way came FreeCell, MineSweeper and Spider Solitaire. This was years before more modern User interfaces, such as WPF existed.
Windows no longer ships Cards.dll which has the images of the cards and some routines that could be called to draw the cards using older techniques, such as Drawing Contexts and GDI.
Using more recent drawing techniques, such as Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and more modern languages, such as C# or VB.Net can make programming games easier.
Below is some sample code that extracts bitmaps from a the native Cards.Dll and converts it to a WPF BitmapSource which can be scaled and displayed as an Image in WPF. A timer shuffles the cards. You can click on the form to pause the shuffling.
You can use this code as a basis of a card game. Before writing the code, I was toying with the idea of drawing the cards on a WPF form using WPF Immediate Mode graphics or a combined Immediate and Retained mode graphic system, with HWndHost
Solitaire used a Dll in the Windows\System32 folder called Cards.dll. Because many of you may not have access to a Windows XP machine, I’ve made it available here.
See also
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/calvin_hsia/2004/08/13/displaying-playing-cards-for-bridge/
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/calvin_hsia/2015/10/31/drawing-old-playing-card-images-for-bridge/
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/calvin_hsia/2014/08/29/logo-turtle-graphics-in-wpf/
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Editor’s note: The following post was written by now former Office Servers and Services MVP Hilton Giesenow as part of our Technical Tuesday series. Albert Duan of the MVP Award Blog Technical Committee served as the technical reviewer for this piece. Given my complete lack of knowledge and understanding of physics, I ordinarily wouldn’t venture… Continue reading Top Elements To Consider When Choosing A Monitoring Tool
We are back! In this episode, Steve Carroll talks with Will Buik about our new MinGW experience in Visual Studio, as we continue to work to enable different types of C++ development scenarios in the IDE.
Today’s extensions are pretty unique, are a growing collection, and do something that seems simple, but can save you a good bit of time, over time.
Greg Trevellick has been knocking out these Visual Studio Extensions, Extensions that will put some of your favorite tools just a couple clicks away. Check out all these “Open In” Extensions!
Let’s look at one of them…
Open multiple files simultaneously in paint.net directly from Visual Studio’s Code Editor window and / or Solution Explorer.
And best of all, all of the “Launcher” extensions are open source!
A repository containing code for use in a series of Visual Studio extensions that allow multiple files to be opened simultaneously in third party applications directly from within the Visual Studio IDE code editor window and / or Solution Explorer.
The Visual Studio extensions are officially available at the Visual Studio Marketplace.
If you like any of these free extensions, please give them a review.
Contributions to this project are welcome by raising an Issue or submitting a Pull Request.
Bugs can be logged here.
Lots of great stuff last week. While below is a select 34 videos, shows, episodes and posts, the big news is a cool new Channel 9 feature, Channel 9: subscribe to show feature!
This week on Channel 9, [Host 1] and [Host 2] discuss the week’s top developer news, including;
Tune in here to watch the exclusive behind-the-scenes highlights from the 2017 US Imagine Cup Finals, Microsoft’s premier student tech competition. Check out the innovative and cutting edge demos. Take a sneak peek at exclusive storytelling and startup tips then watch students prep for their big moment and take the stage! Want to learn more? Watch all the in-depth videos showcasing the entire event!
In this episode of the Adam and Patrick Unplugged show, we talk about some travel updates, ragged hierarchies and a lot about Power BI Premium.
In this episode Thiago Almeida and Bill Barnes are joined by Donna Malayeri, a Program Manager in the Azure Functions team. Donna joins us to show local debugging of Azure Functions written in JavaScript and C# Class Libraries as well as other features and news. …
Analysts visit Microsoft AI +R to learn about research approach and demos of projects.
In January 2014, the east coast (PJM) electricity grid experienced an increase in the price of electricity from $31/MWh to $2,680/MWh in a matter of 10 minutes. This extreme price volatility has become the new norm in our electric grids. Building additional peak generation capacity is not environmentally or economically sustainable. Furthermore, the traditional view of Energy Efficiency does not address this need for Energy Flexibility. The solution lies with Demand Response (DR) from the customer side – curtailing demand during peak capacity for financial incentives. However, this is a very hard problem for commercial, industrial and institutional plants, the largest electricity consumers: they cannot model each building as they are all unique, cannot decide which of the 100,000’s of control knobs to turn as it is too complex, must rely on rule-based curtailment approaches which are ad hoc, inefficient and do not provide any guarantees for energy reduction. …
Channel 9 viewers and content creators have been asking for this feature for so long. You asked–we answered!
Now you can subscribe to your favorite shows on Channel 9. Now I know what you’re thinking, “That sounds too good to be true. My favorite shows straight to my inbox?!” Believe it. POOF! You’re welcome….
Saloni Sonpal joins Scott Hanselman to discuss the newest offering of the Azure Database family – Azure Database for PostgreSQL, which provides a managed database service for app development and deployment with a Postgres database in minutes and scale on the fly…
This Week on Windows we show off the Surface Laptop with Windows 10S, get in on the Fate of the Furious, and showcase the biggest game titles in the Ultimate Game Sale. Topics covered on this week’s episode include:
In this video Mikael Mengistu shows us how to build a simple chat app with SignalR Core.
This quick 6 minute video will walk you through how to install and use the Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ to create Apache Spark applications in Scala and submitting it to an Azure HDInsight Spark cluster.
Ran and Arina are back in the studio (actually, they never left 😀 ) to follow up on their first video to discuss the PowerBI JavaScript SDK. This SDK is a client-side API allows you to communicate with your report and interact with the report within your application as if it were a first-class citizen….
Are you facing an issue in Office 365 and need help to find a solution?
Watch this video to learn how our new Support Platform can help you find troubleshooting steps or how you can reach out to our support agents.
We talk with Lena Hall about functional programming and F#. Which is faster, the mouse or keyboard? Walmart tells vendors to get off Amazon’s cloud. And using AI to play Ms. Pac Man.
There are countless front-end workflows. In what we’re hoping will be the first of a series of episodes on workflows we talk with noted front-end guru and JavaScript master David Wesst (https://blog.davidwesst.com/). JavaScript or TypeScript? Gulp or Grunt? Hear what one expert thinks is the best combination.
Going to Microsoft Inspire 2017 in Washington, DC? Learn about what Voices for Innovation will be doing there.
In this episode, Robert is joined by Phil Japikse, who explores how in modern development practices, unit testing is part of the development process, not a chore to be tackled after you write your code.
Phil spends most of the time on Test Driven Development (aka Test Driven Design), where you write a test first and then write just enough code to pass the test and then refine the code as you add more tests. In TDD, the tests embody the requirements the code must satisfy. …
Welcome to The Xamarin Show Snack Pack Edition. A Snack Pack is bite sized episode that is focused on a specific topic and covered in just a few minutes. Today, we take a look at how to manage and upgrade the ever so important Android Support Libraries in Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms based applications….
Let’s talk about how you can get the most out of Azure DocumentDB! We’ll begin with an overview on what to think about when storing data in a document database covering:
Since its launch in mid-January, the Data Science Bowl Lung Cancer Detection Competition has attracted more than 1,000 submissions. To be successful in this competition, data scientists need to be able to get started quickly and make rapid iterative changes.
In this webinar, we show how to compute features of the scanned images in the competition with a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Cognitive Toolkit (previously named CNTK), and use these features to classify the scans into cancerous or not cancerous, using a boosted tree with LightGBM library, all in one hour….
Learn how you can speak directly to Microsoft’s security engineering teams to influence our products.
Andrew Parsons joins the show to talk about a new competition being launched by Microsoft, called Dream.Build.Play. Dream.Build.Play is a game development competition that is open to all developers, working solo or in teams of up to seven. Create a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) game for one of the categories by December 31, 2017 and you’ll get the chance to win cash prizes and show off your game to the world….
MicrosoftML (MML) is a new machine learning package for Microsoft R Server. Microsoft R Server brings you the ability to do parallel and chunked data processing that addresses the restrictions of in-memory open source R. MML adds Microsoft’s battle-tested algorithms and data transforms that are used by product teams across Microsoft. This brings new machine learning functionality with increased speed, performance and scale, especially for handling a large corpus of text data and high-dimensional categorical data….
In this episode of the Azure Government video series, Steve Michelotti talks with Anna Roth (Senior Program Manager, Cognitive Services) about Cognitive Services in Azure Government. Anna discusses various aspects of how the technology works and how it enables developers to easily write code against the Cognitive Services APIs in any programming language they choose. In this presentation, you will see several demonstrations of Cognitive Services technologies that can greatly enhance the capabilities of government agencies.
The following is a guest post by Maritza Handal, Global ISV Co-Sell Lead within the One Commercial Partner (OCP) Organization at Microsoft.
Microsoft Inspire provides a wealth of information on various parts of our partners’ businesses. But it can sometimes be a little daunting figuring out which sessions to attend in order to optimize your time there. With that in mind, we have created a guide to help partners navigate the sessions, specifically focused on partnering, according to their specific needs. To build your schedule, visit the Microsoft Inspire Session Catalog. To learn more about driving more sales through partnerships, read this post about how to build a robust channel program. Have a great time at Microsoft Inspire!
Whether it’s called data science, machine learning, or predictive analytics, the combination of new data sources and statistical modeling has produced some truly revolutionary applications. Many of these applications incorporate open source technologies (including R) and research from academic institutions. In this talk, I’ll share a few ways that Microsoft is improving the lives of people around the world by applying Statistics, research and open-source software in applications and devices, and describe how Microsoft has integrated R into its data platforms….
This week’s Data Exposed show welcomes back Maxim Lukiyanov to talk more about Spark performance tuning with Spark 2.x. Maxim is a Senior PM on the big data HDInsight team and is in the studio today to present Part 2 of his 4-part series….
In this last video in a three part series on Hybrid Cloud, we will explore the value and efficiencies of hybrid cloud vs. fully on premise or fully cloud based scenarios for enterprise customers. Gain insights into how to increase developer productivity, SQL Server efficiency and peak network performance while reducing overall costs. …
Soumow sits with Joy Chik, Corporate Vice President for the Identity Division in Microsoft’s Cloud + Enterprise group. Joy’s team is responsible for Active Directory, Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Account (MSA), Microsoft Graph, Identity Protection and Identity Management suites which are delivered to customers as cloud services or on-premises products….
Understanding free-form text is hard, be it bug reports or trouble tickets written by engineers or feedback/complaints from customers. We have built SysSieve, a learning system to do automated analysis of these important unstructured (yet incredibly noisy) data sources by building upon techniques from statistical NLP, ML, and information theory. Today, this system is in production use across Windows, Bing, Skype, Office365 and CSS, as well as being leveraged to make platform improvements in our server and network hardware vendors. This video provides an overview of the SysSieve technical details and how it is being applied across product groups.
Mining subgraph patterns is an active area of research. Till now, the focus has primarily been on mining all subgraph patterns in the given database. However, due to the exponential subgraph search space, the number of patterns mined, typically, is too large for any human mediated analysis. Consequently, deriving insights from the mined patterns is hard for domain scientists. In addition, subgraph pattern mining is posed in multiple forms: the function that models if a subgraph is a pattern varies based on the application and the database could be over multiple graphs or a single, large graph….
Security is a hot-button issue in the IoT space; IoT developers should be thinking about implementing hardware and software security features from the start of development. Windows 10 IoT Core provides several of these features to help protect your devices from network attacks as well as physical tampering. In this video, we discuss these features, how to turn them on, and why IoT device security is so important.
In this episode of Defrag Tools, Chad Beeder and Andrew Richards are joined by Paresh Maisuria from the Windows Kernel Power team and Zach Holmes from the Fundamentals team to talk about System Power Report, a new feature in Windows 10 Creators Update….
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Continue reading Last Week on Channel 9: June 26th – July 2nd, 2017
The day has finally arrived! We’re excited to recognize nearly 1400 renewing and 36 new Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals for their contributions to the Microsoft community. These technical experts have received the MVP Award for their deep commitment to technology, and for eagerly sharing their knowledge of Microsoft solutions with the world. Through speaking engagements,… Continue reading Today We Kick Off Our First Annual Award Cycle. Congratulations to all Renewing MVPs!
