My Blog is Moving

Hello valued readers,

I am moving my blogging efforts over to:

http://geekswithblogs.net/robertbunn/Default.aspx

See you there!

Bob

Combining Byte Tags to Get Beyond the 256 Limit

I was working with identity tags and byte tags today, and the obvious short-comings of both became apparent to me.  The identity tags have an enormous number of unique values possible, but there is no tool to create them right now.  The byte tags can be created and printed now quite easily, however there is only 256 different possibilities when using a single byte tag.  So I threw together a way to add multiple byte tags onto a single object to create far more possible values.  4 byte tags together will give about 4 billion unique values.  One thing to remember is that you can’t be sure which byte tag the surface will recognize first, so you need to employ permutations of byte tags here, not combinations.  For example, “0D” and “DD” is the same as “DD” and “0D”.  Anyhow, I just came up with the concept and threw something together, so there are many ways to improve this sample I’m sure.  Download the sample then rename the .doc extension to .zip before unzipping the files.  If you improve upon this please send me a copy if you can and I will share it with everyone, giving credit where it is due as well.

multibytetagsample

Packaging Microsoft Surface App for Deployment

After months of development I finally got around to packaging up my app for deployment in user mode on the Surface.  I did run into a couple of minor hurdles at first which I will share with you, and tell you how I got around them.  First of all, check out the documentation on the Microsoft Surface community site and the SDK.  In your root app directory you will see a file like myapp.xml which is generated by visual studio for you.

The following code example shows the default XML file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<ss:ApplicationInfo
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xmlns:ss="http://schemas.microsoft.com/Surface/2007/ApplicationMetadata">
  <Application>
    <Title>SurfaceApplication</Title>
    <Description>SurfaceApplication</Description>
    <ExecutableFile>SurfaceApplication.exe</ExecutableFile>
    <Arguments></Arguments>
    <IconImageFile>Resources\icon.png</IconImageFile>
    <Preview>
      <PreviewImageFile>Resources\iconPreview.png</PreviewImageFile>
    </Preview>
  </Application>
</ss:ApplicationInfo>

Notice in the <ExecutableFile> element, how it has “SurfaceApplication.exe” as the value?
It should really look like this:

%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Surface\SurfaceApplication\SurfaceApplication.exe
The urls in your other elements like the previewIcon should follow the same format. Hopefully, this helps some people out.

Converting WPF Apps to Surface Apps – Part 1

I have found myself converting WPF apps to Surface apps quite often lately.  Most of the necessary changes are fairly obvious, but I encountered one lately I thought I would share with you.  In WPF apps there is functionality to capture the mouse cursor, but in Surface we have no mouse.  So we need to perform the analogous catch of a finger (or whatever else you like) contact.  Below is the first method I needed to change in a recent project:

private void OnMouseDown(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs args)

{

UIElement source = sender as UIElement;

Point p = args.GetPosition(source);

if (a boolean)

{

this.CaptureMouse();

}

else

return;

}

By the way, “this” is a ContentControl.  Notice the this.CaptureMouse() line?  Clearly this needs to change for surface.  There is no this.CaptureFinger() on a SurfaceContentControl (that would be way too easy).  So I modified the above code to the following:

private void SurfaceContentControl_ContactDown(object sender, ContactEventArgs e)

{

UIElement source = sender as UIElement;

Point p = e.GetPosition(source);

if (a boolean)

{

e.Contact.Capture(this);

}

else

return;

}

So in this case I switched:

this.CaptureMouse();

for this:

e.Contact.Capture(this);

That was easy enough.  Let’s try another.

private void OnMouseMove(object sender, MouseEventArgs args)

{

UIElement source = sender as UIElement;

Point p = args.GetPosition(source);

if (!(sender as UIElement).IsMouseCaptured)

{

//Do some stuff

}

}

Which I changed to:

private void SurfaceContentControl_ContactChanged(object sender, ContactEventArgs e)

{

UIElement source = sender as UIElement;

Point p = e.GetPosition(source);

if ((sender as UIElement) != e.Contact.Captured)

{

//Do some stuff

}

}

So in this case I changed:

if (!(sender as UIElement).IsMouseCaptured)

into this:

if ((sender as UIElement) != e.Contact.Captured)

We’re on a roll here, let’s do another:

private void OnMouseUp(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs args)

{

if (this.IsMouseCaptured)

{

UIElement source = sender as UIElement;

Point p = args.GetPosition(source);

if (a boolean)

//Do something

this.ReleaseMouseCapture();

}

}

Turns into this:

private void SurfaceContentControl_ContactUp(object sender, ContactEventArgs e)

{

if (this.IsAnyContactCaptured)

{

UIElement source = sender as UIElement;

Point p = e.GetPosition(source);

if (a boolean)

//Do something

this.ReleaseAllContactCaptures();

}

}

Now you know how to change mouse capture logic in old WPF apps into new finger capture logic.  Please feel free to comment if you know how I could improve this.

WPF Developer Wanted – Microsoft Surface Development

Hello everyone,

The company I work for CSG in Denver, CO is looking for WPF developers to work on Microsoft Surface projects.  No experience with Microsoft Surface is necessary, just WPF.  Any knowledge of XNA would be helpful, but not necessary.  If this interests you please send your inquiries or resume to hiring [at] csgresults [dot] com

Bob

Microsoft Surface – Drag and Drop Tutorial Series – Part 2

This is Part 2 of my series on implementing drag and drop in Microsoft Surface.  In part 1, we created a Surface Window with a Surface ListBox and a ScatterView in it.  We hooked up our ListBox to a data source of products coming from Amazon.com.  Now we will get to the good stuff and make drag and drop a reality in our application!

I posted this tutorial on The Code Project since it was easier to deal with the download and formatting issues there.  Please see the article at:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/SurfaceAppTutorialPart2.aspx

Microsoft Surface – Drag and Drop Tutorial Series – Part 1

This is going to be part 1 of a multi-part tutorial on how to implement drag and drop on Microsoft Surface.  In this part we will add a Surface ListBox and a ScatterView to our Surface Window as the basic controls we will need here.  We will also show how to use the Amazon.com web service to populate your list box with anything you like.  We will not get into performing drag and drop in this part, we will simply set ourselves up to do this starting in Part 2 of this series.

I moved this tutorial to The Code Project since it was much easier to deal with downloads and code formatting there.  Please check out this tutorial at:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/SurfacAppPart1.aspx

Microsoft Surface – Restoring unit to initial factory state

Last week I needed to completely reset my surface unit back to factory settings due to erratic behavior (mostly in VS 2008).  I followed the docs on the process Microsoft released in their SDK, but I had a couple of hiccups I thought I would share with you.

1.  When you restart your surface you will want to hit your delete key once a second when the bios screen appears.  Then when that screen changes you will want to hit F8.  For some reason I had difficulty timing these key strokes.

2.  you will need to switch from the X: drive to the C: drive to run the recovery.cmd command.  Believe it or not, I tried cd C:\ to switch drives.  I haven’t needed to switch drives in a long time in a command window.  The proper way to switch drives is to type in just C:\ without the cd part.  How embarrassing.

3.  I know some threads on the Surface forum suggest that you might need a “secret” password to do this (maybe I misread them), however I found out from Josh (Surface guy at Microsoft who really knows his stuff) that this password is only needed for more advanced bios stuff.  He didn’t detail what that was exactly, but restoring my surface unit wasn’t one of them.

Other than these hiccups the restore went quite smooth and relatively quickly if you follow the docs Microsoft provides.

Microsoft Surface – Cool tricks to test your applications in user mode

I tried my first attempt at running an application in user mode yesterday and learned a couple of things.  You can find both of these things in the documentation, but who actually reads the docs?  If you want to test out an application in user mode, but don’t feel like going through creating and copying the xml file to the proper folder, there is a way around this.  I copied the exe file into the “T” users Documents folder (anywhere else would work to).  Then I clicked on the “Enter User Mode” shortcut which you have on an administrator account.  Once you have been switched over to user mode then hit “Ctrl-Shift-Esc.”  At this point you will see the task manager, which will allow you to browse to and start the exe you saved earlier.  Simply hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to get back to Admin mode.  If you try to switch to user mode and you get an error message that says something like “object is in an incorrect state” (or something like that, I can’t remember it exactly).  You probably changed your table user account password.  To fix this problem you need to use SurfUser.exe.  Change the directory in your command line to the folder containing the surfuser.exe executable and run the surfuser regen command.  The surfuser app will regenerate and register that new password with the system for the default table user account.  You can change the default password for the table user account, but you must use the surfuser app to do this.  The docs will tell you how to go about this.

P.S. Don’t forget to make sure the bios on your surface unit is updated to the latest version which at the time of this writing is 0206.  See “BIOS updates for a microsoft surface unit” in the SDK docs for further details.

Microsoft Surface – Turning WPF controls into Surface controls

When I first started learning Surface I quickly realized how to turn a WPF app into a surface app.  Basically, I did a search and replace for each control in the WPF app that has a matching control in Surface such as Button and TextBox.  By doing simple replacements I was able to get a surface app up and running quickly.  However, I recently learned a way to really extend this method.

All you need to do is edit the control template for the particular WPF control (that doesn’t have a surface twin) and in the template convert all instances of Button into s:SurfaceButton, all instances of Slider into s:SurfaceSlider, and the Thumb into s:SurfaceThumb, etc..  Just make sure you change both the controls themselves, as well as the control styles (for instance, if the first control in the template is a <Button> and it has a <Button.Style>, so change this to <s:SurfaceButton> and <s:SurfaceButton.Style>).

See my previous blog post for a way to get at the entire default control template for editing.