Computers & Programming

This quick article describes a mechanism of data hiding that I have been using with some success. Data hiding is a mechanism where information in an object is not accessible to users of the object and, more importantly, not visible to users of the object. Some data hiding…

I wrote some code and then had an epiphany. A minor one but one that made me realize I had approached something in the wrong way. It was not much code and can be reused with the new idea. First, the requirement is that the train move in…

I just figured out why the concept of realistic train management was giving me trouble. I really hadn’t tried to figure it out in any detail before and as soon as I did, the problems became obvious. First A real railroad can do things that would be considered…

I am providing this code in C# for a Visual Studio 2010 add-in to set the caption of the Visual Studio window based on information in the solution. All of the other code samples I found, all two of them, are only partially usable. My VS Solution always…

I’ve been thinking about various computer programing projects for years. One is a railroading game that focuses on realistic track building and realistic operations or a small (shortline) railroad. Another is an evolution simulation. There is also the mechanism simulator that I have working fairly well. The thing…

I’ve been staring at the code I wrote for the train game for a few days now. I can’t figure out my own code although I know why things are the way they are. The test program, which is really just a program to allow me to draw…

Maintaining old code is what I do at work most of the time. If there is a new feature to be added to the product, there will still be a large amount of existing code that needs to be waded through to get to the places where the…

It was an easy fix once I read a few forum posts that were slightly related. Paths to an old Windows NT 4.0 DDK were specified before the standard library paths and it caused the wrong libs to get linked in for 64 bit builds. I don’t really…

I have installed Visual Studio on two Windows 7 x64 machines. One has Visual Studio 2008 on it. The only for this post is to rant about Microsoft. I created a new console project, accepted the defaults for everything in the new project wizard, and built it. This…

I’ve been messing around with that evolution simulation code. There’s a few things in the code that I don’t yet understand but that’s common when trying to understand the inner workings of code you didn’t write. For instance, some values related to behavior rules are initialized using random…