Computers & Programming

I was thinking earlier today about my railroading/train game ideas. In my train game, you would manage a railroad. The first version of the game would have the player starting with enough money to build a small railroad. The game would take place in an area that had…

"Agile" software development often has developers, testers, writers, etc., all working for a short period of time to 100% finish one small part of the product before moving on to another part of the product. This time period might be as short as a week. At the end…

Silverlight applications on a Windows Phone use a web-style mechanism for page navigation. Most applications will have at least a few levels of child pages in a hierarchy where a child page represents some sort of activity started by an action on a parent page. In a weather…

… or “How my app dies and comes back to life to read its own tombstone” I’m working on code related to tombstoning my Windows Phone app. I’m slowly discovering that the Microsoft designers were not thinking much about app developers when they designed their tombstoning feature. When…

Since I am writing a Windows Phone app for a private company during my free time, I don’t have any other news to report. I can’t describe much about the phone project because it is all proprietary. I’ll try to have more cool posts some day. Dave

Time Zone handling in programs is interesting. Beyond the incredible inconvenience of Daylight savings time, programs tend to use the local time and let other programs deal with that information. I suggest that all code in the world be changed to send and receive data using GMT, UTC,…

I had this problem that I wrote about this morning where I needed to save a pointer to a member function in one object then call it in another object of the same type as the first. The code would work fine in C++ because it is possible…

There are no such thing as function pointers in C#. There are no pointers. There are no function pointers in Java, JavaScript, and many other languages. So how does one handle saving a function and then calling it later from where it is saved? “Delegates” is what they…

Microsoft Visual Studio is a great tool. The integrated development environment let’s me manage large projects with multiple components. I can manage the files, edit the sources, build the entire product tree, and debug code line by line, all using this one software package. So why is it…

I’m working on a Windows Phone project. This is a native app for the Windows Phone OS. I have a Nokia 710 for testing and things are going smooth. So far, the only problems that I have had are related to not knowing the intricacies of the XAML…