| |
 |
Friday, December 20, 2002 |
DX9 ships
My friend Craig Andera has been lucky enough to work with DirectX 9 and reports that the C# API is pretty cool. This bit of code oughta whet your appetite:
using Microsoft.DirectX;
using Microsoft.DirectX.Direct3D;
Device d= new Device(0, DeviceType.Hardware, this, CreateFlags.SoftwareVertexProcessing, presParams);
// Use Gouraud shading to make curved surface look curved
d.RenderState.ShadeMode = ShadeMode.Gouraud;
// Turn on ZBuffering so things hide things that are "behind" them.
d.RenderState.ZBufferEnable = true;
// Enable smoothing
d.RenderState.MultiSampleAntiAlias = true;
// Enable lighting
d.RenderState.Lighting = true;
...do some work to render to the device...
d.Present();
Looks pretty fun...
12:57:25 PM 
|
|
They said the specification was squeaky clean..
Okay, crap joke, but Clemens reports that SOAP 1.2 has reached W3C candidate recommendation status.
12:20:23 PM
|
|
1% of ASP.NET sites run on Apache?
This little note from Netcraft says that about 1% of ASP.NET sites are running mono_mod on top of Apache. Pretty surprising given that mono_mod hasn't even gone version 1.0 yet.
Interesting to get this email the same day that Sean and Scott are talking about new features in IIS6. In their words:
IIS 6.0 – Completely re-architected. All those application recycling options that you got with ASP.NET, you now have with ANY web app, so you can get much better reliability out of your classic ASP applications. Pooling’s better. Now everything is in a pool. You can put one or more applications in any given pool. Also – and this is very cool – the entire IIS metabase is now just an XML file. And IIS automatically makes a backup every time the file changes, so if you screw it up, you can just restore a previous one.[Early & Adopter]
Sounds to me like in 2003 we're going to have controversy over who's the better ASP.NET platform Apache, or IIS...
11:55:45 AM
|
|
Winding down the year
So the class is ending today and I think it went pretty well. When you've got students for 12 hours a day you have to make it fun. One of the best traditions we have is the "Guerrilla programming challenging" where we invite students to write fun applications in .NET in their free time during the course and demo them to the audience for fun and prizes. We are almost never disappointed by the entries. This week was no exception - we got everything from a multi-threaded Sierpinski Triangle generator to a webservice-based trivia game system. My favorite entry was an app that scanned the network of student machines to see what processes were running and bundled the results into performance counters, so that we could fire up perfmon on the instructor machine and see how many students were playing solitaire, minesweeper etc. etc. Great fun, and a nice demonstration of the System.Diagnostics namespace. I'm always amazed at the creativity of students.
With the ending of this Guerrilla I'm done speaking and traveling for the year. 2002 has been hectic for me but I've had loads of fun. In the last month or so I've fallen in love with programming all over again - it feels like there are a lot of fresh ideas coming out right now. Managed code is running on a variety of platforms and architectures, the WSE guys are shipping some great-looking specs, there's lots of people talking about AOP, the Java community is finally really starting to pressure Sun to do something meaningful to Java.
I'm really looking forward to 2003. DevelopMentor has been brewing a few things internally for quite some time that are finally really starting to come together and I can't wait to help some of them see the light of day. As usual I have about a dozen other projects that I'd like to work on but probably won't. That's what I like about this industry though - it can be frustrating, vexing, or enlightening, but it's never boring.
2:27:05 AM
|
|
© Copyright 2003 Jason Whittington.
|
|
