Quick Fix: You can't debug the Silverlight application because the Silverlight Developer Runtime is missing
Tuesday, October 13, 2015Problem
You've fired up the shiny new Visual Studio 2015 (or an older version) to debug a Silverlight 5 application and you get an error: "You need to install the latest Silverlight developer run-time before opening Silverlight project". And in matters requiring a blog post, the go.microsoft.com link provided doesn't go anywhere.Solution
Microsoft, intelligently, gave up on Silverlight but there are still many projects that require it. My day job is Lync development and I needed this to troubleshoot a Lync CWE. All variations of the run-time are still available, but due to a security issue, they were moved to an obscure place... a security bulletin!What you want is KB3162593 (updated to June 2016 patch), select Silverlight_Developer after clicking Download. Click the install link and you'll see Silverlight_Developer_Runtime.exe as an option. Be sure to uninstall Silverlight first, or you'll get an error. The 64-bit variant is there as well, along with the Version 5.0 SDK and others.
Woo Hoo! Time to party like it's 2011!
And in case you're looking for the Toolkit, it's still at its old CodePlex link.
HOWTO: Fix a GE XL44 Gas Oven that won't pre-heat (or takes forever to pre-heat)
Sunday, September 13, 2015Disclaimer
You're messing with a gas oven. Natural gas is dangerous. Electricity is dangerous. You could break your oven. You could burn or kill yourself. If you're not comfortable with fooling around with these sorts of things, call a professional. I'm not a professional, I'm a homeowner who likes to tinker. This information is provided AS IS with no warranty express or implied. If you use any of this information to repair your stuff, YOU are responsible for the outcome and agree not to hold me responsible for it...even if the information I've provided here is dead wrong.Repair Difficulty
Holy cow was this easy. Including taking apart, pulling the oven out of its spot, installing and putting it all back it took me 15 minutes to complete.Symptoms
The problem can present itself as several different symptoms. In my case, the oven would take a long time to light and once it lit, it would shut off within a few seconds. I've had problems with this unit before and the symptom was that it wouldn't light at all. Because it was firing up but then shutting off, I had thought it might be the valve that was at fault, but after a lot of reading on the interwebs, I went after the igniter. When I tested the oven igniter, I noticed that it didn't glow nearly as yellow as the broiler igniter; that's a sure-fire sign of a failed igniter. It's a cheap part, available here: GE WB13K21 Igniter for Oven, and if it turns out that wasn't the bad part, rest assured, it'll fail at some point and it'll be good to have a replacement around. Be sure to search the exact model number of your oven (it's on a sticker that's visible when you open your warming drawer or oven door). Mine used the square igniter. Some use the round one.What's wrong?
One word: Igniter. The igniter on these units has a lifetime, sometimes short, sometimes a few years. It depends on how often you use it, but it will fail. Most of the other parts on the oven will last a very long time. This one wont. Luckily, it's easy to replace.Why is it doing this
Again, I'm not a professional, but I understand a little bit about how these things work. The process for starting your gas oven is pretty simple. Electricity runs through your igniter making it glow. In a working igniter, it will glow yellow/white and become *very* hot. When it reaches the right level of "hot", the valve that controls the flow of gas into the burner opens up. If for some reason the igniter isn't getting hot enough, the valve will not open. In my case, the igniter just beginning to fail. It was getting plenty hot (well past the point of being able to light the oven), but electrically it wasn't getting hot enough for the valve to keep gas flowing into the burner. As a result, within a second or so the valve would shut and the flame would die (and a small stench of natural gas would flow into the room).Tools Needed
A 1/4" socket wrench or a screw driver that uses magnetic replaceable bits (common in "multi-screwdriver" tool sets -- they just happen to be 1/4").A flat-head screw driver and a Phillips head screw driver (or appropriate bits for your magnetic replaceable head screwdriver).
Steps
Unplug the oven from power.Shut the gas off leading to the oven.
Take the cover off of the bottom of the oven. This is done by removing the two screws in the back, pushing the bottom cover toward the back and tilting it up and out.
Take the warming drawer off by pulling it all the way out and then pushing up on the little plastic tab sticking out of the left side of the drawer arm and down on the right little plastic tab on the right.
You'll see the following in the back of your oven.
Remove the two screws securing the igniter.
OPTIONALLY - If you haven't purchased your part yet and just want to get the oven Bake feature working (we rarely use the broiler so we were more OK with that being out), you can swap the two igniters if they are identical in your XL44 (there are *many* models of XL44 on the market, so check them). If you decide to do this, remove the small metal panel from the back to get to the connection for the broiler igniter and remove the two screws securing it (Phillips head).
Install the new igniter. If you purchased one with a connection attached, just plug it back into where the other was.
Install the new igniter the same way the old one was installed, plug in the oven, re-open the gas valve and start a pre-heat. It should glow yellow:
HOWTO: Get the conditional compile symbols defined in the project for a source file (ITextView) in a Visual Studio Extension
Monday, August 31, 2015Fortunately the Visual Studio SDK provides a way at these values. Unfortunately, it's not as straight forward as I would have liked.
Conditionals given an ITextView
Here's a quick extension method I whipped up to pull the "defines" out of the project file given an ITextView/IWpfTextView.
private static IEnumerable<string> Conditionals([NotNull] this ITextView textView)
{
if (textView == null) throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(textView));
// Get the text document from the text buffer (if it has one)
ITextDocument textDocument;
if (textView.TextBuffer.Properties.TryGetProperty(typeof (ITextDocument), out textDocument))
yield break;
var componentModel = ServiceProvider.GlobalProvider.GetService(typeof(SComponentModel)) as IComponentModel;
// Get the VsServiceProvider
var vsServiceProvider = componentModel?.DefaultExportProvider?.GetExportedValue<SVsServiceProvider>();
if (vsServiceProvider == null) yield break;
// Get the DTE ...
var dte = (DTE) vsServiceProvider.GetService(typeof (DTE));
ProjectItem projectItem = dte.Solution.FindProjectItem(textDocument.FilePath);
Configuration activeConfiguration = projectItem?.ContainingProject?.ConfigurationManager?.ActiveConfiguration;
var defineConstants = activeConfiguration?.Properties?.Item("DefineConstants")?.Value as string;
if (defineConstants == null)
yield break;
// DefineConstants entries are listed semicolon and comma delimiated, so we need to split on both.
string[] constantSplit = defineConstants.Split(new[] { ';', ',' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
foreach (var item in constantSplit)
yield return item.Trim(); // They can contain whitespace on either end, so we'll strip 'em.
}
Of course, you could get some of those services via an Export and eliminate the GetService / GetExported value calls, but I thought I'd include them since I don't know what you've decided to get from MEF.Have a lot of fun!
Stay Frosty Visual Studio Extension - Method Block Highlighter, Text Clarity, Background Images and a lot more...
Sunday, August 30, 2015For the most updated information, visit the release page
It's hard to believe but I've been working on this extension for almost a year. That's what happens when you only have a few hours every weekend and the occasional evening to work on a personal project. It started out with a simple desire to add a chiseled effect to the text displayed in Visual Studio. I used to get horrible migraine headaches and that little effect made text visibility at low contrast much better without having to change my syntax highlighting rules. A little later I decided I hated being tied to my multi-monitor setup just to be productive when writing software. So I started working exclusively from my laptop screen, a nice 1920x1080, but still not as nice as having a few portrait 1080P displays and a primary 2K, but with a little bit of a change in how I worked (mostly just getting used to some features I never had needed with unlimited real estate), I was easily as productive on my laptop screen. The advantages of changing scenes means I can work when I feel an inspiration; no more having to tuck myself into a room.
Features
Most of the features of Frosty were designed with two purposes in mind: (1) Make working with code in limited screen real estate easier and (2) Make my environment prettier. Both are quite subjective and I don't expect everyone to agree with my decisions ... in fact, I wrote this for me, so if I'm the only user, I'll still be happy!Method Blocks
Method Signatures
Text Rendering
Text rendering in the editor window is also configurable. Much like the great extension, TextSharp, except I only apply the effect to the text editor window (no reason for this other than that I didn't need the rest). You can enable ClearType or kill it, along with other things WPF allows you to tweak that Visual Studio doesn't give you direct control over.Chiseled Text Effect
Configuring
Go to "Stay Frosty" in "Tools|Options". You'll find it *highly* configurable. I like ultimate control over my environment so I tried to leave nothing out as far as customization. Maybe you don't like the features I've implemented? Turn 'em off or change them! Sure, software should be opinionated,... except when its users are developers.License
I'm not ready to release the source code quite yet, but I will be. The extension is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. I had to learn quite a bit about Visual Studio Extension development over the last few months and I'm hoping that my experiences with it will help others, so I'm separating out parts into their own projects that can be used by others as utility libraries. Right now, time is keeping me from completing that part, plus I'd like to get a little more feedback from testing in the wild before I throw that out there.Compatibility
At the moment Frosty supports Visual Studio 2013 and Visual Studio 2015. I'm using the awesome NRefactory library for code parsing in Visual Studio 2013. The 2015 version, of course, uses Roslyn and as a result performs a bit better than the 2013 version. Since I started with 2013, I didn't want to abandon that work and all of the folks who are stuck on the old version.Caveats - It's Beta
It's beta. If you run into difficulties, please let me know at matthew dot dippel at google's public e-mail service. I'd love to get it right and working. If you want to help out, I'll have the code out on GitHub soon!There's (at least) one bug. The signatures don't always disappear from the left hand side when the top of the method becomes visible again when scrolling up. And it does use some additional resources when parsing code on Visual Studio 2013 -- it shouldn't get in the way too much on a decent machine (it performs well on my Core i5)
Updates from Initial Feedback
If you use ReSharper (I do!), you can enable their syntax highlighting rules (disabled by default, enable them in options).You can now enable the Method Signatures to display regardless of whether or not the method signature is scrolled off screen (disabled by default).
Abstract methods are no longer bordered.
Two libraries were removed in favor of the PresentationFramework equivalents.
The error that some were seeing when visiting the options page might be fixed. (I'm not seeing this on my machines)
If ReSharper or the User Classes/Enums/etc Fonts and Colors option is missing, we'll use Identifiers instead of Plain Text.
Fixed an exception that occasionally happened on file load where the width of the adornment would be calculated to a negative number.
Fixed the caching of method signatures so they wouldn't have to be re-created every time they were drawn.
Download the Visual Studio 2015 Edition
Download the Visual Studio 2013 Edition
Quick Fix: Could not load file or assembly when instantiating XAML component (or IoC component) in a Visual Studio Extension Project
Wednesday, July 22, 2015Symptom
You're writing a Visual Studio extension that involves some XAML or IoC code that references a DLL file. When you attempt to instantiate the control, the debugger pops up with "Could not load file or assembly". You've checked the Fusion log and notice it isn't looking in the folder that contains the extension!Fix
Add the attribute [ProvideBindingPath] to the class that represents the package (the class that implements the Package base class which is often completely empty).Why?!
Visual Studio's Extension engine usually figures out where your reference .dll's are and binds them easily, however, when a .dll is referenced in XAML or IoC, it isn't explicit enough for Visual Studio to handle proper binding. The ProvideBindingPath attribute tells the extension engine to look in the extension folder when attempting to resolve dependencies. In my case it was a fancy options page that used XAML for its UI rather than the automatically generated UI.Stay Frosty Extension Preview - A WPF ShaderEffect for chiseled or beveled text
Saturday, June 27, 2015Stay Frosty
There's always been a retro movement in the programming world. Every time a new tool comes out that reduces the requirement to memorize commands or the complete API of a language, there's many among us who wish we had a green terminal and punch cards. The elite look down upon us folks who love Visual Studio, spouting off about the advantages of vi/vim, emacs and other ancient, though powerful, tools. I came from that era. Screw it. I like my Intellisense and GUI based IDEs. I like defaults that build (most of the time). I like using a keyboard shortcut to fire the whole thing off in a debugger and I enjoy a gargantuan 32-bit text editor.I use many text editors for lighter-weight work. Sublime is awesome, as is the atom.io editor I'm starting to fall in love with. But my primary language for work and play is C# and Visual Studio has the tooling I need for that work. And if you're going to use a GUI interface for text editing, it might as well be really, really Gooey!
For the last 4 years or so, I've had an extension I wrote for myself to add a simple background graphic to the text editor window. I wrote it for Visual Studio 2010, originally, and since that time there have been many others that do the same thing. I decided late last year to take it a step further.
What, precisely, are you trying to fix?
I used to get Migraine headaches regularly. I had tried triptans (and found out that my body does not metabolize them correctly) and many other medicines. None worked. Thankfully that's in the past, now, but prior to last year I had to figure out how to live my life and do my job while dealing with a very intense headache. I've never let Migraine keep me from living my life. Unfortunately, displays of any kind seem to trigger the worst sensitivities. My only trick was to work in a dim room with the Brightness setting on my display turned down. Unfortunately, many colors become invisible as the brightness drops. My options were limited, so I used the Visual Studio Color Theme Editor extension to keep two themes, one titled Migraine and one titled Normal. The Migraine theme had most of the syntax rules set to the same color, and all of the text was very, very bright. It was not ideal for using day-to-day but it worked when I needed it.Sometime around 2011 I purchased an 27" iMac. At the time it was the least expensive IPS display at its resolution and it had the added benefit of having a Mini-Display Port plug on the back that would allow you to plug in an external PC. I used it as my monitor and rarely logged into OS X. I did, of course, download XCode and all of the Apple development environment tooling. One morning I woke up with the familiar headache symptoms and began work in my home office. The Windows box had shut down and I was left on my Apple screen, so I powered up the PC and logged into my Mac to waste away the boot time on the web. The last time I had logged in I had left XCode (I think that's what it was) up. I noticed immediately that at the lowest display setting, all of the text was readable. The principal reason for this was a very subtle text chiseling applied to the code editor window. This got me *very* excited -- I could code using my normal syntax highlighting and still read the text at low brightness! A quick look around though spoiled my excitement. There was no ShaderEffect to be found that could apply this chisel. I'd have to write my own. And I'd have to write it in a language that I was unfamiliar with. Having too much to do already, I put it down until late last year.
A Mac-like Chisel Effect
The brilliant folks in Cupertino did something rather simple. The effect was no more than a subtle glow on the bottom and shadow on the top. Surely this couldn't be difficult to reproduce. It turns out, in the end, it wasn't all that difficult. I am not a game developer. I've never written a line of shader code. While I am plenty familiar with C and comfortable with the math, I found myself in hell without a debugger. Something so straight-forward was complicated by subtle requirements WPF imposes on ShaderEffects. Multipass? Nope. Alpha that works like the rest of the libraries I was familiar with? Nope. It's pre-multiplied. I was amazed at the body of knowledge I had to immerse myself in to write a simple ShaderEffect for 2-dimensional text. I wanted, after all, a pixel above and a pixel below the boundaries of the font. I was up against ClearType, DirectX and the fact that in the realm of 3D the concept of a pixel is absent, and of course, GPU parallelism. Fun.The Stay Frosty Extension
The title is a bit of a joke. I got a chuckle out of Scott Hanselman's comment in the first paragraph of his Visual Studio Programmer Themes blog post and thought I'd swipe it.The main purpose of the extension is to improve code text readability. WPF has long had a lot of complainers about how it render text. In the version used by Visual Studio 2013, you can tweak the text with several rules around font smoothing, hinting and rendering as well as requiring that the output snaps to the pixels of the device that's displaying it. I've exposed these as settings. You can apply rendering, font smoothing and hinting rules as well as require text to snap to device pixels. I've tweaked the window to allow the placement of a background image and an override to the background color without requiring the aforementioned Theme Editor extension installed (and it'll override whatever theme you've put there, as well). In addition, you can (optionally) apply the ChiseledText ShaderEffect and control the settings around it (described below). I plan to add many, many more capabilities to it and it will be released under the Apache 2.0 license as well, however that's my planned first release.
Here's how it looks in my environment fully customized:
The ShaderEffect
You can download the library complete with the HLSL source and the ShaderEffect class implementation from its BitBucket repo. The effect is simple but could still use some tweaking. It's "good enough" at the moment, but if you have any improvements, I'll gladly accept them!How it works
Very loosely, it works by layering a darkened and lightened version of the input offset by the size supplied in the size parameter. That's not really how it works, but that's how it appears to work when you use it. In addition to the two layers, the original sampled pixel is mixed in so that parts of the font aren't wiped out as the shadow and glow are offset. Due to pre-multiplied alpha and some blending, the main part of the font remains identical to the input color and the glow/shadow are lighter and darker. As I said, it's very simple.Usage and Limitations
Reference the library and add the effect to any text element. It'll work with other elements, but the results may not be all that great. I designed it to work with small text since it was aimed at the code panel in Visual Studio but it works fine on large text, as well, provided you tweak the effect settings accordingly. The effect is applied vertically, only. It would be easy to change to allow an angle specified and, in fact, the earliest working prototype I had did this, however it nearly doubled the instruction count and performance suffered. I wanted this thing to work well with software rendering and to be as inexpensive as possible, so that's a trade-off I took and it's the other reason it will start to look less than ideal with large text.- Size - This is the size (roughly) in pixels of the effect. This is really the offset of the two layers. The glow layer is usually far more visible than the shadow layer so changing this might have the illusion of only increasing the glow portion of the effect. It's a double, so any fraction is fine. If you use a negative number, the chisel will appear as a bevel. The ideal value will vary depending on the target size of the text. The effect above uses a value of 0.5f which is also the default.
- GlowIntensity - This increases the intensity of the glow portion of the layer. Remember that the actual color is just a combination of glow and shadow, so increasing the glow will similarly increase the overall brightness of the font, too. Sorry about that. The default value for this is 1.0f
- ShadowIntensity - Same as Glow, but for Shadow. If Glow and Shadow are the same value, the font in the middle should be about the same color as the input.
- MixDivisor - It's a terrible name and I will be changing it. At the end of the HLSL, the input pixel and the new values calculated for the two layers are divided by this number. 3.0f is the default and causes the text to barely blend with the background. Increasing this value will make the text and the effect blend more with the background. Use the Intensity and this value together to get the desired result. The text in the picture above uses a value of 3.5 on a background of #FFAAAAAA.
I also strongly recommend a font with some meat on it. Mac OS renders fonts differently than Windows. They're chunkier and cleaner. Google mactype if you want similar results in Windows, or use a very high-quality OTF font. I use Source Code Pro Medium, free from Adobe, and it works quite well. I'll write up some more later explaining the effect in detail. I won't waste much time on the C# code required to use the shader, it's very simple.
As far as the Stay Frosty extension, I'm writing it in some very limited free time. It's nearly done except for a few issues around settings that I'd like to sort out.
You can download the entire library with its code from its public BitBucket repo. It has the path to fxc.exe hardcoded in the pre-build. You'll need to ensure you have the Windows 8 SDK or the DirectX SDK and you'll need to modify the path accordingly. That was a time trade-off for me.
Reliving the Past - The Visitor Access Kiosk
Monday, May 11, 2015Before this sounds horribly boastful
This project was a defining moment for me as a developer. I had, up to this point, been mostly focused in Web/Database applications that were used internally. I had quite a few wins in this area, but nothing that ever extended beyond the walls of the company (beyond a project a few years ago that was sold to a vendor of ours whilst we were in the throws of Bankruptcy).Stupidly, I had never thought to just "google it". At the time, Global Crossing didn't put videos on YouTube, and I'm not entirely sure how it even got there. It was a *monumental* task and I was *not* the right developer to be doing it, but I love code and I love solving hard problems (from time to time). In this case, the VP of our department (an awesome guy who's name I'm omitting because I haven't asked for his permission), asked if I could create a kiosk that would allow a visitor to contact someone in the office from a secure visitor lobby, have a video/voice conversation with them (one way video, inbound to the employee only), would print a one-day-use badge with their picture, name and relevant information and give them a way to sign out when their visit was over. This was to replace the need for a dedicated receptionist, or a pen/paper log-book.
Some implementation details
Unfortunately, the only copy of the original whitepaper has been removed from Microsoft's site -- it was for Office Communicator 2007 R2 (technically we ran it on this version, but it was developed targeting the pre-release of R2), so I'll include that hereI implemented it as a WPF application, touch-only (at a time when a 1024x768 SAW touch screen was $1500). I used a barcode scanner, a simple label printer attached to a USB -> Ethernet device, a Logitech camera, and a ThinkCenter PC running Windows XP (stripped of everything unnecessary, including the Explorer shell. All of the code was my work (that's a statement of fact, not pride -- I would be embarrassed by that code today). My good friend and former coworker George Morell and I handled the operating system hardening -- when you have a guy at your disposal that can tell you the location of every obscure OS registry setting from Windows 2000 to Windows 8.1, you defer to that incredible expertise. And our security guys did some network hardening to ensure that if someone took a sledgehammer to the device and grabbed its ethernet port, it'd be worthless to them.
Most of the application was written in C# (.Net 3.5, I think, I remember thinking ... "generics?" ... like "templates in C++?"... no ... not exactly) with some bits in C and one really nasty bit in C++ (it was the camera interface). It was not a difficult thing to write, but at the time, it was a difficult thing fore me to write.
Without further ado, the Visitor Access Kiosk.
I had to laugh while watching it. The UI is comical today, but keep in mind that this was developed at a time before Windows 7 was released. Windows Vista and Windows XP's "chrome" were the inspiration behind the design. And I had some fun with XAML.
FIX: Fix Plex Media Server Remote Access / Unable to Connect to Plex from The Internet (code=-52)
Monday, April 6, 2015Symptoms
You've opened the ports on your firewall and verified that they are open via an open port check tool on the Internet.You've tried Why am I locked out of Server after password reset or device token removal. You've successfully pulled out many locks of hair (optional).
You've even turned on UPnP on your router, just to test (you can turn it off, just make sure the port is opened and forwarded correctly).
Error 52 / code=-52
Your log has this line:WARN - MyPlex: Invalid response when mapping state (code=-52)
What's happening
Some part of the Remote Access registration process fails if the host operating system is configured to use Jumbo Frames. If you don't know what that means, that's OK. I'm running an OpenSuSE Linux box as my Plex server and I am not a Linux expert, so I can't even really tell you where to go (if you know, leave a comment, please!).For OpenSUSE, do the following:
$ sudo yast ... Your password ...In yast, go to Network Devices and select Network Settings.
Select each network adapter and choose Edit.
Go to the General tab and change the MTU to a value that will prevent Jumbo Frames (1400 is a safe test value for most people, but you can google your optimal based on the kind of broadband you subscribe to).
Exit and try it all again (I restarted the plex server as well, just for good measure).
Nermerle, Nitra, Parsing and Functional Programming
Monday, March 30, 2015Functional Programming
I started looking into Functional Programming about ten years ago and when F# 1.0 came out, I decided to start paying attention again. I initially explored it as part of a project I had embarked upon to parse a DSL and provide a suitable development environment that a non-developer could use to customize my application. It was a lofty goal and ultimately was scrapped in favor of a much stripped down model that was driven via web forms and a small subset of the features, but the DSL was still available for more complex needs.Parsing HLSL
Recently that need arose again. I've been messing around with WPF Shader Effects and 2D sprites. No, I'm not developing a game (sorry, no real interest here). The biggest frustration for me has been the lack of debugging information available. My usual process for exploring new languages is a combination of reading/research and poking/reverse engineering. I was the kid that took apart every piece of broken/outdated electronics growing up. After picking up "The Basics", I usually dive right in and write some (terrible) code to see what it does. I'll also read/step through open source code that I think I conceptually understand to validate my understanding.Hlsl makes my learning process more difficult. I can't step through the code; I can't watch. The way it encodes colors into float4 values is sufficiently different from what you'd expect that predicting what the value would be requires you to know about things like Premultiplied Alpha, mapping textures to float values between 0 and 1. Your college calculus class will come in handy even if you did poorly as most things related to programming/math require you to have a good understanding of how it works even if you don't remember the details. Wolfram|Alpha will will help you if you've forgotten the specifics.
Built-in IDE tools provide barely any information when the HLSL files are rendered by WPF. I'm not sure how valuable they are outside of that, but they're useless here. The larger tools available from NVidia/Intel are overkill and mostly don't cover the areas I was hoping (the NVidia product simply didn't support most of its features on my particular GPU ... Notebooks).
Building a narrow-purpose IDE
I started out exploring WPF ShaderEffects using the wonderful Shazzam. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, downloading the tool from his site isn't possible but a slightly outdated version (in code only) can be acquired from CodePlex. I tweaked it a bit for my purposes and created a shader effect that I mostly liked. Getting to the fine details, though, was difficult and I knew I'd need more insight into what was going on.Enter Nemerle, F# and Nitra
The first thing I wanted was better parsing of the code before compile. I went digging around and found a syntax highlighting definition for HLSL. The language has some unique elements, such as Vectors whos parts are accessed via array notation, or .xyzw .agbr notation. It's quite elegant, but my eyes weren't naturally parsing it coming from languages that didn't do that.The rabbit hole began there. The editor used by Shazzam was a way old version of that used by SharpDevelop. It's since been updated and the core text editor can be grabbed independently from NuGet as AvalonEdit. It works quite differently from the version offered by Shazzam, and syntax highlighting is much more powerful. So I created a Syntax Highlighting Definition for AvalonEdit that would color the .argb items as a variant of gray, red, green and blue and used shades of gray with underlining for the wxyz (I'll get the definition out on GitHub when I have a chance and link to it here).
The Shazzam tool was also missing Intellisense and some of the code signals that Visual Studio provides, so I went looking for a solution there knowing that my old friend F# was probably going to find a way back into my life for this one.
Surprisingly, it was Nemerle and the [Nitra Project from JetBrains]|(http://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2013/11/12/an-introduction-to-nitra/) that got my attention this time. Tom Jones' Getting Started with JetBrains Nitra specifically covered parsing HLSL! Thanks for that!
It lacked the ability to understand shader2D and had no preprocessor support, but after adding shader2D, I now had a library that easily integrated with AvalonEdit to provide syntax highlighting failures and guidance for repair... All from a concise syntax file.
I wanted something a little more. Inspired a while ago by Bret Victor's Ted Talk, I decided to see if I could create an IDE that would give useful feedback about how the program works while it is being developed. HLSL is a limited purpose language, and WPF ShaderEffects limitations limit it even further. It's the perfect target for an IDE that gives intelligent feedback about the program being written while it is being written. By providing sample inputs and the ability to provide custom inputs for the function, a person can see what the outcome of the code would be in various scenarios,... as close to live as possible.
At this point, I'm building a new HLSL parser specifically targetting the limitations imposed by WPF to ensure that code syntax and rules are followed carefully.
I'm then going to start evaluating ...
Enter the God Awful Visitor Pattern
I'm an OOP guy most of the time. The pattern fits well much of the time and most .Net programmers are comfortable with it. However, The Visitor Pattern hurts my brain.C# lacks Multiple Dispatch without the DLR. I'm not interested in passing type safety all the way to runtime. The Visitor Pattern is the way around that problem. The pattern is relatively straight forward, but figuring out its intent by looking at the code is painful. F# and Nemerle have pattern matching capabilities and allow multiple dispatch. The resulting code is readable with a small reference to the syntax (Nemerle is easier to read coming from C# than F#, IMHO) and the amount of resulting code is substantially less.
My Plan for Next Time
Unfortunately, this is not my day job. It's Saturday/Sunday Early Morning/Late Evening work. I have no code samples at the moment because I just moved my F# code to Nemerle (and it's so much easier to understand). I hope to spend some time with the parser next weekend when I will have a little more time to poke at it. If I get it to the point I want it, I'll write it up and thow it out on GitHub.Until then ... Don't panic!
Nemerle documentation can be found here.
Nitra syntax, not terribly well documented, but somewhat easy to follow after going through the Nemerle documentation.
HOWTO: Add Code Syntax Highlighting to your Blogger / BlogSpot Blog
Tuesday, March 24, 2015Solving my own problems
Last year I decided to poke about in my blog again and managed to utterly destroy the template along with all of my past customizations. I've decided to take the time to figure this out and then document it so that I can do it again when I decide to "code in production" again. So in the typical, slimmed down style, here's how it's done.- Get to your blog's dashboard (log in, select blog from blogger dashboard).
- Select Template on the left hand navigation and Edit HTML on the screen that loads
- Locate the </head> tag (side note for testing later: better to not put this in head because it will prevent page from displaying until loaded).
- Paste the (hopefully now highlighted) code below. We're using cdnjs as the host for the .js scripts. I've read other instructions that suggest hot-linking directly to the author's site. I checked the install instructions on the site and he specifically asks you to copy the files locally.
Template Code
Here's the code I added to <head>:<script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shCore.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushPlain.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushCSharp.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushBash.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushJScript.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushXml.js"></script> <script type="text/css" src=""></script> <link href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/styles/shCore.min.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <link href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/styles/shThemeMidnight.min.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <script type="text/javascript"> SyntaxHighlighter.config.bloggerMode = true; SyntaxHighlighter.all(); </script>
And the Html
I've included the exact HTML used to render the above. Note that the "<"'s are all replaced with <. That's a limitation I've decided to accept rather than using the alternative <script> block style.<pre class="brush:js"> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shCore.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushCSharp.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushBash.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushJScript.js"></script> <script type="text/css" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushXml.js"></script> <link href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/styles/shCore.min.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <link href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/styles/shThemeMidnight.min.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/SyntaxHighlighter/3.0.83/scripts/shBrushXml.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> SyntaxHighlighter.config.bloggerMode = true; SyntaxHighlighter.all(); </script> </pre class="brush:js">
Customizing for your purposes
SyntaxHighlighter can be customized. At this point, there's many available syntaxes to choose from. Find the brush you want and visit the cdn.js page for SyntaxHighlighter to get the link.There's also plenty of themes. Find what you want, visit the cdn.js page for a link and add it to the scripts above.
Weekend Adventures in Coding - Visual Studo Customization - Order of Adornment Layers
Saturday, February 14, 2015Font rendering was helped by re-running the OSes Clear Type configuration and installing Text Sharp. If this sort of thing is important to you, you also want this free gem: MacType. It causes Windows to render fonts in a way that is more similar to a Mac which I find improves readability substantially. Unfortunately, it doesn't work perfectly everywhere, but some of Visual Studio is affected.
I've decided today to see if I can apply the last bit, a white shadow to text. This is a common effect throughout MacOS/iOS and I find it improves readability (particularly for high-contrast backgrounds).
Here's what I'm looking to apply (apologies for formatting, I'll get the code formatter working again, soon).
item.Effect = new DropShadowEffect
{
Opacity = 0.34,
ShadowDepth = 9,
Direction = 542,
BlurRadius = 9,
Color=Colors.White
};
Finding an efficient way to do this (preferably without having to hack about with Reflection) has been frustrating, but I've managed to apply all kinds of effects elsewhere while I was attempting to fill in the gaps of the documentation with some reverse engineering.Default order of Adornment Layers
While poking about, I thought it might be helpful to know the order of the default adornment layers. I just started (re-)evaluating OzCode and it was picked up by the "Exp" (temporary debug instance), so some of these belong to that. I'm also on CU4 so any that aren't documented may belong to that (search PredefinedAdornmentLayers or hit F1 for the documented ones).CodeBackgroundTextAdornment
vsMergeHighLightSpaceAdornment
Outlining
DiffernceChanges
Difference Space
BraceCompletion
DeltaFullLineAdornment
DeltaNegativeSpaceAdornment
HtmlProvisionalTextHighlight
CurrentLineHighlighter
VsTextMarker
TextMarker
HighlightCommentAdornment
SelectionAndProvisionalHighlight
Inter Line Adornment
Squiggle
LineSeparator
CollaborationMethodEndorsement
ScriptDebuggerSectionDivider
Text
PinnedLayer
vsMergeHighlightSpaceAdornmentAboveText
SmartTag
DragDropAdornmentLayer
Intra Text Adornment
VisibleWhiteSpace
Caret
SimplifyVisualController
PinnableTips
InitialDifferenceWaitingAdornmetLayers
HtmlChrome
I have no idea what I'll be doing with these, but that's the fun of reverse engineering. If you have to do such a task, OzCode is very helpful. It allows searching the contents of objects through several layers and can surface interesting bits to play with. This is, of course, experimental and likely will break between updates, but they've made extending Visual Studio so easy, it's not that bad to tweak between updates/versions. More to come if I figure this out!
Another chapter after 17 years
Saturday, February 7, 2015On to new things!
After 17 years, I have decided to resign my position at Level (3). 17 years. That's a lifetime in IT. I started at a small telecom located in Southfield, MI and ended up at an international telecom with a headquarters in Broomfield.What a ride
I started as a desktop tech, within a half-year I was doing servers. Ultimately Allnet was purchased by Frontier, Frontier by Global Crossing and then the bottom fell out. For the remaining years until about last year, I worked for a company that was effectively a start-up in a very competitive sector. Layoffs every year were normal while Global Crossing struggled (and ultimately succeeded) with survival. Level 3 purchased Global Crossing in 2011. For 15 of those 17 years, I rode the wave down and for the last two I've been riding it back up. It was strange working for a company that was not operating in survival mode.It was 17 years for me, but nearly every year I was given a new position, more responsibility and new and interesting projects. Mix in the fact that I was working amongst, what I considered to be, some of the best people in our industry.
Onto Development
I'd always been a programmer. I'm not sure why I took the ops route originally, but within two years I was writing code that was changing the way our employees worked and I knew right away that this is what I was made to do. I love programming...love it. Over the years I was given the freedom to code, experiment and learn. I quickly jumped on the C# bandwagon, missing the days of hacking about in C and Pascal/Delphi and fell in love. And I learned...So why now?
After 17 years, I've discovered that it's time for me to move on. During my time at Level 3, I had the privilege of working on some special projects involving Lync and Office Communications Server. This was my first exposure to an API that I couldn't simply Bing (there's one for you, MS) a million answers from people who had just learned the API. The APIs I was working with were pre-release, but after release the situation wasn't much better. For some reason, I enjoyed this immensely!What now?
I had sent my resume out to Modality, a Microsoft Partner and a company with a very successful business in the Lync space, earlier last year. This wasn't unusual for me. If someone mentioned a job that sounded interesting to me, I usually prepped my resume, took and interview and turned down the job. It's happened so many times over the years that I almost expected to make the same decision when Modality had a position available to me. After talking to the guys over there, much to my own surprise, my mind was made up.I'll be a US based, "work from home" (I prefer remote) employee working for a company that sells services and software for an application that, since 2008, has been the reason I could work effectively as a remote employee for Global Crossing and ultimately Level 3. Being a part of a company that was an early adopter--eliminating all phones on PCs and replacing them with USB headsets and speakerphones was far less of an adjustment than anyone could imagine---was great for me. The quality and effectiveness of audio conferences suddenly made it possible to have a workforce that was distributed far and wide without losing much other than water-cooler conversation.
Finally
Farewell, my Level 3 coworkers and friends! You are among the best and many thanks for the help, support and just-plain-fun you've given me over the last 17 years.
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I write code, sometimes from a beach.