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

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 – Customizing the look and feel of the ScatterViewItem (and other controls)

The ScatterViewItem is a very useful way to get the “surface feel” into your apps very quickly. However it is likely you will want to customize how your ScatterViewItem looks and reacts to user input. The following steps will help you customize it to your hearts content. This procedure could be applied generally to any other control as well.

1. Create a WPF application in Visual Studio, add a ScatterView and ScatterViewItem. Save the project.
2. Open project in Expression Blend.
3. Under Objects and Timeline, right click on the ScatterViewItem control, select Edit Control Parts (Template) -> Edit a Copy…
4. Give it a new name like ‘ScatterViewItem_Customized’ and click OK.
5. Save the project and return to VS. VS will prompt you to reload changed files.
6. Now you will have the entire default control template to modify to your hearts content.