Shmuelie's Blog

Senior Software Engineer working on the Microsoft Store App at Microsoft. I do the impossible in C# and JavaScript, sometimes at the same time! Opinions Mine.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

what it boils down to

jews: have collective intergenerational holocaust trauma which impacts everything they think and say about the state of israel, regardless of whether or not they support said polity. we learned this from our elders who learned it from survivors.

non-jewish leftists: can't or won't understand that trauma, accuse jews of using the holocaust as a moral shield, show no interest in unlearning the anti-Semitic tropes buried deep within their mindsets and worldviews and how those unquestioned beliefs influence how they speak about israel

neither group: has likely done much critical thinking about any of this

result: jewish individuals categorize gentile speech which is deeply critical of israel as anti-Semitic because that speech included something which triggered that generational trauma, and the only language they had for it is "that's anti-Semitic." meanwhile, gentiles assert that, as a result, jews cannot be trusted to define their own oppression

mess.

which could be solved by everyone sitting down, letting their egos drop, listening deeply, and thinking critically.

but that's not going to happen

[shmuelie]

Let Minecraft use ALL THE RAM

While I've never seen Minecraft use anywhere near even a Gigabyte of RAM, I've configured my system to have access to all 24 Gigabytes of RAM my laptop has.

Open the launcher menu (aka Hamburger Menu).

Switch to the "Launcher options" tab.

Select the Minecraft configuration you want to configure.

Look for an option

-Xmx

. Change that to the amount of RAM you want Minecraft to have.

[shmuelie]

HoloLens

At Build 2015 Microsoft brought hundreds of HoloLens to demo in order to let developers get a feel for how it works. HoloLens is Microsoft’s device to bring the digital world into “reality”. The device shown was supposed to be close to the retail version with release date rumored for September. Many people have given their opinion on the feel and usage of the device, with some on the development cycle we were shown, as limited as it was.

I will expand on that development system to give a better picture of what to expect from HoloLens from a developer position. I will be: looking at Microsoft PR, talking to the HoloLens team, and speculating on potential uses.

For starters, HoloLens will run any Universal Application. These applications are developed to be sold from the Windows Store; and they will work on all Windows 10 devices—including HoloLens. “Modern” Office, games, RDP, and so many other Universal Applications will just work, no modification needed. They will be able to follow you around in constant point of vision or be pinned to a location so that they are always there. You could for example pin a recipe application to a location in the kitchen while wanting the Skype application to follow you around. If the application makes a sound it will automatically sound like it is coming from the location of the application, pinned or not. This requires no extra work on the part of the developer. Such apps will be written in C++/C#/VB/XAML and HTML/CSS/JS.

The cooler applications though will be those that look 3D. Examples range from the simple weather application Microsoft has shown, to driving a 3D car that “drives” over the terrain of the real world. These applications are more what people think of when they think “Holograms”. These applications are still Universal Applications. What makes them unique is that they use Direct3D instead of Direct2D (used by XAML and HTML/CSS). Instead of rendering a 3D world on to a 2D space these applications are rendered in 3D in “3D”. There are special objects that must be used so that they are rendered as “holograms” instead of 2D but they are very simple and don’t change how the developer creates the 3D world.

In the developer demo that Microsoft did at Build 2015 the 3D development was done using Unity, though developers can use Direct3D directly from C++. It can also be used in C# via SharpDX or any technology that use Direct3D under the hood. The only limitation is that the technology must provide a way to “inject” the HoloLens objects. Currently this programing model does limit “holograms” to those who can build 3D models in programs like Maya or don’t mind using object built for others. In the future though the hologram effect will be programmable from XAML in some manner making the entry barrier much lower.

The final three parts to “holograms” are handled by HoloLens for the developer with minimal work. 3D sound gives the API a sound file and telling it where to play the audio from. HoloLens does the math to make it “3D”. The speech command API is very simple: give it a phrase and an event is fired when that phrase is said. Gestures are elegantly handled by the system as well. The developer can ask to be alerted to gesture “A” and the API will do so.

One of the big fears of HoloLens was that the API would be hard to develop for a C++ complex application requiring advanced knowledge to understand. In fact the opposite is true. The API is incredibly easy to understand and developers should find making HoloLens applications very easy.

[shmuelie]

Cross Platform UI

The goal of this post is to list all the cross platform UI frameworks for .NET/Mono I can find. I'll update it with new ones as I find them. I am not recommending any of these over any others. I'm simply listing them.

Commercial:

Noesis: Support Windows, Windows Store, OSX, Linux, Windows Phone 8, Android, and iOS.

Xamarin.Forms: Supports iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 8.1

C#/XAML for HTML5: The Web so...

Closed Source

Empty Keys UI: Based on MonoGame, FNA, or SunBurn. OS support based on underlying engine.

NOV User Interface: Supports Windows and OSX.

Open Source

Ruminate MonoGame GUI: Supports Windows with beta support for OSX.

WPF Light: Supports Windows, Windows Store, OSX, Linus, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and PlayStation 4.

Avalonia: Supports just Windows?

Perspex: UNIX, Windows, OSX.

ETO: Supports Windows, OSX, and Linux with iOS in beta.

XWT: Supports Windows, OSX, and Linux.

Hope someone finds this helpful!

[shmuelie]

Using Node Tools for Visual Studio to Work on Command Line Tools

I join the generator-csharp open-source project. It's a great project and I'm proud to be a maintainer. Being that my favorite IDE is Visual Studio and I had just heard that the Node Tools for Visual Studio had just hit 1.0 I thought I had a great setup. Installed the tools, created a NodeJs project around the source code.

Only one problem, the tools are designed to help you debug a server project really. After poking around a bit I came across a solution. First you right-click on the NodeJs project and go to the projects properties screen. On that screen is a text field for the path to Node.exe. Instead though if you have that point at the launcher for your project it will start up your project in fully interactive mode. Need to pass arguments? Just enter them in the text field for Node.exe arguments.

In my case the tool I need to launch was yo and it was in fact the argument that would load my code.

[shmuelie]

Setup Script

For servers the big thing is to have scripts that you just hit go and it sets up the server for you. After thinking about it I figured why can't I have this for my machines. My setup is predictable and should be scriptable.

At first I was going to do it all in PowerShell but I'm no PowerShell genius and I quickly hit road blocks. After a week or two of trying to get past the road blocks I realized that the solution was ScriptCS.

ScriptCS is a project that allows you to use C# as a scripting language. This was exactly what I needed. So now I used PowerShell to install ScriptCS and then it would run C# Script files using ScriptCS that would install things for me.

So far I've got SysInternals and Visual Studio Installation scripts. Working on more. Hopefully sooner than later I'll have the whole process done!

[shmuelie]

Generics and Enums

Generics and Enums just don't get along. Just reading this StackOverflow question and its answers shows that. I had to battle with them myself today for a bit. What I wanted to do was cast an enum to a generic parameter that while I can't limit to a Enum I would know was always was an Enum since it was internal. You can't usually cast with generics unless you have a restriction on the generic parameter and the restriction can be cast. BUT you can cast from object to the generic. So with a double cast I did it!

Just thought I'd share

[shmuelie]

Code on the Go - Architecture

Version 1.x of Code on the Go was really architecture-less. For 2.0 I wanted to have an architecture, and in the end, two primary types were used.

The first is the module design pattern. In the module pattern, you do not define things on the global. Instead, you use a library (Almond in my case) to give you two functions: define and require. You use the define method to define new modules. The function typically takes in the name of the module, an array of modules that the module depends on, and a function that has the dependencies passed in to as parameters. In the function, you create the object that you want the module to represent. It can be a simple object or a constructor function. It can even be as simple as a string, number, or Boolean value. The function is called the first time the module is request, either by the dependencies array or define a or by using the require function that passes the requested module. The library then stores the result of the function and passes it along as the result of all future calls to the module. The basic idea here is that a module only knows about modules it needs, cannot change those modules, and does not need global objects to cross-files.

The second is the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern. The MVVM pattern is a spin on the classic Mode-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. The breakdown of MVVM is

Model: The data passed      around that you display to the end user. For example the file that you are      editing.

View: The code that contains User Interface (UI) objects like buttons. Important is that it does not know about the Model. For example the HTML in Code on the Go.

ViewModel: The glue between View and Model. It knows how to convert the Model into data and functions that the View can use. It contains properties that the UI links to and methods that the UI calls to change the Model.

The idea behind MVVM is that the Model and the View are completely independent of one another. This allows you to tweak your View without needing to worry about the model or to have more than one view of the data. A good example of different views would be in a stocks application. The Model consistently has the same information about the stocks but you can have many ways to look at it, graphs and tables for example.

Code on the Go consists of a small Model, "one" View and many ViewModels. The reason I say one in quotes is because technically there is only one HTML file so one view, BUT because of the way I have split it into multiple ViewModels it is like having more than one View. The ViewModels break code up into parts like one for controlling the Tabs, one for the Editor View, one for the Debug View, one for the Home View, etc. The ViewModels are intertwined, containing one another. There are some standalone, self-executing function style files too. One manages the CSS styles for instance; another is the entry point for the application.

That covers the overall architecture of Code on the Go. Next time I will talk about individual tricks I did to make things easier, like the CSS style manager class.

[shmuelie]

Code on the Go - Libraries

Last time we discussed version 1.0 of Code on the Go; both the libraries I used and why I decided to do a rewrite for 2.0. Now we're going to talk about the libraries I used in 2.0. I'll explain what they do and why I decided to use them.

WinJS 2.0 In the case of WinJS the question really become "Why HTML/JavaScript?" After all I could have used XAML/C# and been just as comfortable. The reason I chose HTML/JavaScript was the same in both: The editor library. In the XAML/C# world there are editors out there but none are free. Now I have zero issue paying for something but they are not cheap and I had no idea if this would make me any money. (Still have no idea for that matter.) In the HTML/JavaScript world I knew of one free code editor, CodeMirror, and would learn of another while developing 2.0.

Orion Orion an open source HTML/JavaScript code editor. I found it when looking in to making my autocomplete better in CodeMirror. Knowing that the Esprima library (see below) would be my best bet I started poking around the site. To my shock there was an example of using Esprima to power autocomplete. I quickly investigated and found out that the example had imbedded a library called Orion. Now I had to chose: Use Code Mirror that I knew and had some features that would make life easier (like a document system to make having more than one file open at a time simple), yet Orion was less black box like for me as well as had autocomplete that put CodeMirror to shame. I decided that autocomplete would win the day. The version or Orion that I use has been heavily customize. I do plan to submit that work to the project at some point. Orion provides syntax highlighting, autocomplete, code folding, undo/redo, text formatting, brace matching, and more.

Almond Almond is an Asynchronous Module Definition (AMD) library. AMD is a development pattern where you define "modules" and then import them as needed, removing the need for most global variables. Originally I had no plan to use the AMD pattern, planning to use a name spacing system. Orion though was build internally to use AMD via Almond, though it exposed a global variable so you could use either. As I tweaked Orion I got to like the AMD pattern with Almond and decided to use it. I like it so much that I've made it my default pattern now.

Knockout Knockout is a library I had been meaning to try for ages. It gives you data-binding in HTML. Data-binding is a way to allow you to not have to use 'getElementByX' methods or inline on-event handlers. This allows the two code sources to be extremely independent of one another. Knowing that I loved Dad-binding in the XAML world I figured I'd love to have for HTML too and I did.

Continuum Continuum is one of the most interesting I've seen. Continuum is a JavaScript Runtime Environment written in JavaScript. I've always loved the project but had no good use of it, till now. One of the features that I'm proud of developing is a "debug" mode for Code on the Go. It uses Continuum to run and test your code while being safe and sandboxed.

Esprima As explained in the last post Esprima is a library that analyzes JavaScript creating an AST. In fact there are THREE versions of Esprima in Code on the Go. Orion contains a modified version for JavaScript autocomplete. Continuum contains a version that it uses to help it run JavaScript. Finally there's a version that I added and use to show users syntactical errors in their code. I have thought about trying to reduce down to just one version that they all could use. For now though I'm leaving it at three.

CodeMirror Once I had decided to use Orion for the editor I had expected to drop CodeMirror and I did. Then I wanted to add the "debug" mode. To do so I need a user interface. After trying different things I realized I could use the demo that comes with Continuum with some modifications. That demo used CodeMirror and I didn't want to spend the time yanking it out yet. And so CodeMirror returned.

PortableRest PortableRest is a library designed to make calls to REST services simple. While currently the only place I use it currently is to receive feedback from users eventually it will be used for more.

OfflineAjax OfflineAjax is a library I built to solve a simple problem. If I user submits feedback while the machine is offline I would need to store it and send it at a later point. And that's what OfflineAjax does. It provides an object with nearly the same API as XHR but only adds each request to a queue, only popping items out when there is internet. Currently there is a flaw in that if the app loses focus the queue is loss.

MetroColorPicker Metro ColorPicker is a user interface component that I made. It allows a user to select from preset colors or define their own. I use it to allow users to customize the colors in the editor.

That covers the Library's I used. Next time I'll talk about the code architecture I used.

[shmuelie]

Leaving Avalon for WPFLight

In 2013, I was faced with the decision of how to build an application that was to be on both Windows Desktop and OSX. Being both a C# developer and a JavaScript developer I could have easily gone the web style direction like most others I know would, but instead I decided to go for a C#/Xamarin approach. (Why I decided against the web is a post onto itself.) That did leave me still with a learning curve for UIKit on OSX, since Xamarin is designed with the idea that you write the business logic once but write the UI for each platform. While this makes sense and I generally agree with it, this time I didn't. Our app was designed to be more like an "app" in that we would want it to look nearly identical on both platforms. Just as importantly, I didn't have the time to learn UIKit.

Then I heard of MonoGame. MonoGame was a cross-platform implementation of the XNA Libraries. (For those who don't know, XNA is a game graphics library from Microsoft, kind of a managed way to use DirectX). I came up with the grand idea of writing the application using C#/Xamarin for the backend and using XNA/MonoGame for the UI. Issue was that XNA/MonoGame doesn't come with "controls." I'd have to create them from scratch.

Luckily I found an open source library that had already started down this very path. By the time I was done with it though, about the only things that were left of the original in my fork were basic concepts on how to do the hierarchy of drawing controls. I named my creation Avalon, after the code name for WPF. I had tried to get the company to release Avalon as an open source library, even going as far as registering a Twitter account. Sadly the closest I got was them thinking about doing a weird selling model.

Sadly near the end of 2013 I was laid off, killing the project. Being as no trademarks had been made on the name, I had very slowly started work on recreating the code, without the source code so I'd have no issues. Didn't get very far to be honest.

Then a few weeks ago a new open source project call WPFLight came to my attention. It was almost the same idea: UI concepts on top of XNA/MonoGame. It was way better than mine and used XAML files, making it easily familiar to developers.

And so I have decided to abandon Avalon. It was a sort of vaporware to begin with and now I've finally admitted it to myself. Going forward I plan to contribute and support WPFLight, and maybe use even use it. :)

Goodbye Avalon, you served me well. Hello WPFLight!

[shmuelie]

Code on the Go - Origins

Before I delve into version 2.0 I thought I would start with explaining the 1.x versions, what I did right and of course what I did wrong.

Version 1.0 was a very simple app, meaning it had nothing over the competition. Like some of my competitors I was using the CodeMirror library as the core to the app. CodeMirror is an HTML based code editor that offers Syntax Highlighting, Undo/Redo,  VERY basic Auto Complete, Code Folding, and more. I added tabs which most of the competitors did not do but the two competitors I was afraid of did. (And no I am not telling you who they are, I want to keep you using Code on the Go after all).

Besides CodeMirror the only other library I used was Esprima. Esprima is a library that analyzes JavaScript creating an AST (if you do not know what an AST is just think of it as a representation of your code as objects). At first Esprima was used to create a slightly better auto complete. In short it worked by keeping track of where in the code you were and where variables were declared. By comparing the two it would guess the variable and then if the variable had a primitive value (String, Number, or Boolean) it would show auto complete for that type. The second use for Esprima was to find code errors (things that just simply are invalid code and will not parse) and show them to the user.

Both Esprima and CodeMirror are still used in Code on the Go. Code Mirror is used as the "console" in the debug view. Esprima is used for the same things, Auto Complete and error finding, though how it is actually done is completely different.

The primary reason for not using CodeMirror in 2.0 as the main editor was that I could not easily hack it. Most of the things I wanted to hack have been added or fixed since then but it was too late.

Now 2.0 was a complete rewrite from 1.x. There is ZERO code that was kept from 1.x (unless you count code inside Esprima). The reason for this is that the code was simply bad. While it was pretty inventive, it was hacked together at first and it showed. User interface (UI) code was rewritten because if I was honest with myself the original UI was simply terrible. It was not even remotely touch friendly, it had way too much unused white space, and some things just didn't look polished.

Now that we know where Code on the Go 2.0 came from we can start looking at it. Next post I will go through why I chose what libraries I did and how they fit together.

[shmuelie]

Code on the Go Develpoment Series

Starting next week I will begin to post about the upgrade of Code on the Go from 1.x to 2.0. It was a major rewrite of the whole code base and I think the coding tricks, frameworks, and what I learned will help other developers looking to develop using WinJS.

To start off the follow is the list of Libraries I used:

WinJS 2.0

KnockoutJs

Almond

Code Mirror

Esprima

Orion

Continuum

PortableRestJs

OfflineAjax

ColorPicker

Over the next few weeks I'll show how I used these libraries and what I learnt along the way

[shmuelie]

MonoGame.Js

Yesterday I released MonoGame.Js. As it name suggest it is MonoGame but in JavaScript. It is not writing C# code and having it run in the browser like JSIL but instead a JavaScript library that provides an API that is very much like the MonoGame API.

Why did I do it? Besides my want to see MonoGame on as many platforms and in as wide use as possible, it's also because I believe that the API model exposed by MonoGame is so good that even if you're not using C# it would be helpful.

Right now MonoGame.Js implements 2D graphics, and Mouse/Keyboard input. Touch input is planed though when it will be added I do not know. I have no plans to add 3D support but would be doable and if someone wants to do it in a fork I'd be happy to take that pull request.

[shmuelie]

Learning Linux

Well after being unemployed for a while I decided it's time to expand my skill set. After looking around for what skills companies where looking for a big flaw in my skill set I saw was that while I can do client side web cross browser, I only know server side from the Microsoft stack (with a limited C++ and apache ability thrown in). So I decided it's high time I learned the LAMP stack. For those who don't know what LAMP is, it's an acronym standing for common Linux (the "L") web stacks. the exact meaning of the other letters is subject to change. For me the rest will be

A: Apache as the web server M: MySQL for the database P: Python for server side code.

The thing to note about that list is that I chose precise for all letters except "L". In the case of Linux I decided not to pick just one but three: Debian, Fedora, and Slackware. Each is a "Core" distribution that other more commonly know distributions come from. For example Ubuntu, one of the most well know and most common consumer distributions is a fork a Debian. CentOS, a popular server distribution is a fork of Fedora. By learning these three I won't know how to use every distribution out there but I should know the basics for each "family" and be able to quickly learn the differences.

For the "P" I thought about choosing PHP, despite my extreme dislike of the language. After all, like it or not it's THE language to use it seems. I decided not to because learning Python would not only help me add the LAMP stack to my skill set but also all me to use it in other contexts. PHP is really only useable in LAMP (or web context that is). And admittedly it allows me to continue hating PHP.

As to MySQL and Apache, I've use both in the past. MySQL was part of a friends college course work and I helped her through it. Apache I used a previous job. Obviously I didn't really explore MySQL that much in helping my friend and at the previous job I was using the C++ integration with Apache so the skill set doesn't exactly transfer. On top of that most of the work I did wasn't with Apache but with the custom system built on top of it.

So with the new year comes a new skill set and a new stack to work on. First up is learning the three Linux distributions in VMs.

[shmuelie]

Windows 9 Prediction

Talk my brother today I made a prediction:

Windows 9 will be the one where the desktop goes away. Until then we'll just get 8.x versions.

So I'm putting it out there. I've said it.

[shmuelie]

Windows Phone 8 GDR3 and IPv6

On Friday I tweeted this little tidbit:

So apparently @windowsphone #GDR3 has an IPv6 bug...

— Shmueli Englard (@Shmuelie) December 13, 2013

And I thought I should try and give a bit more background to that now.

For some reason on Friday my phone wouldn't sync my Office365 account, It would give me error code 80072EFD. After looking around on the internet for a while I came across a thread on the Office365 community forums. It appears to me that the last poster is right since I tried exactly what was suggested. While I had the issue (and on my Data Connection, no WiFi), I tried to go to ipv6.google.com and no luck. Turn on Airplane mode, wait for it to fully shut off all the radios, and then turn it back off. After that the account started syncing again and I could access google over IPv6 again.

Don't know what the real issue/bug is but I hope it gets fixed before GDR3 is released.

[shmuelie]

Microsoft's iPod Touch... Finally

On Monday I decided I hadn't visited my local Microsoft Store recently enough. While there I saw this sign and it made my day.

The reason this made my day is since the days of the Zune (yes that's the throw back isn't it) Microsoft hasn't had a modern competitor to the iPod Touch (and Windows Mobile/CE PDA like things don't count, I said modern). When the Zune HD most people though it was Microsoft's iPod Touch. Unfortunately for Microsoft and the Zune brand it was not. It was not meant to compete at all with the Touch, instead it was to just one-up the "normal" iPods.

Its taken Microsoft 5 years but they finally did it. And for that I applaud them.