Something to code...

I had said that I wanted to steer my programming efforts toward creating some piece of software.  It's the end of January and I still don't know to do yet.  The trick to this is to pick something you're excited about and build from that.  I'd do well to create a program with the most recent stuff I've been working on.  That would be OpenGL.  Boy that really narrows down the possibilities.

C# and XML

I really didn't expect this one to be much of a challenge.  I've dealt with parsing XML in PHP, Javascript, and VBScript already and they weren't too bad to do.  I suppose it doesn't help that C# has like five different methods for parsing XML, so when you do any sort of search you get results for all the different methods that you need to sort through.

This is the method that I picked out to use.  Mostly because it's the one I figured out the quickest, but partly because it also works in Mono.  The XDocument class looked like the easiest one to use, but it's not normally available outside of the Microsoft .Net framework.  The XmlDocument class is available everywhere, and isn't too hard to work with, so that's the one I'm supplying these notes for.

Versioning Assemblies in C#

While working on an ASPX page there was some process that was supposed to copy over new DLL's for the page.  It was handy since it did all the registration and whatnot needed to make them work.  Until the page stopped working correctly, inexplicably new code wasn't being pushed to the site.

The errors make sense looking back at it, but when the pages are being updated but not the libraries the run time exceptions can seem pretty vague.  It didn't help that my compiler and debugger were on my laptop while the server hosting the page was in another building.  I could tell that the pages were updated since any old text editor would show it, but the libraries didn't have any useful markers beyond file size.

To finally prove that the libraries were being dropped somewhere I needed to give them version numbers so there was something more concrete to test with.

Colored Face

I'm getting better with the colored pencils.  Not great, but I'm starting to feel that my color work adds depth to the pictures rather than makes them look goofy.  I still haven't quite gotten my shading too good yet, but it's improving.

I felt like doing a quick write-up of how I approach doing a colored face.

Hypoallergenic Sugar Cookies

My niece is something of a challenge to cook for.  She's allergic to dairy, eggs, nuts, fish, and a few other things so the available menu is pretty small.  When you can't eat butter and eggs most desserts aren't an option.  For the past several years I've baked her cookies for Christmas.  As you might guess the challenge is in finding a recipe that won't send her into anaphylactic shock.

Shader Attributes

We've passed data to our shaders, but it's one size fits all data.  There's going to be situations where we need different information for each vertex, and pushing all this in uniform blocks just isn't going to work.  It's time to try shader attributes.

These are arrays of data, each element of the array should correspond to one of the vertexes.  When the shader executes it will only read the element that corresponds to the current vertex.  This is handy for things like locations, colors, normals and so forth which need applied individually to each vertex.

Talking to shaders

I've finished create the most basic of shaders, and they work in the sense that they get polygons onto the screen.  Let's step them up a bit.  To do that we'll need to pass data to the shaders, perhaps a color and maybe the model projection matrix to start moving away from those deprecated attributes.

I'd like to move up to a newer version of OpenGL, but I'm limited to version 3.0 (GLSL 1.3) since that's the highest version I can reach with all the machines I work on.  I'll make an effort not to use any features that are removed in later versions, I can't make any promises since it's not always easy to know what features those are.

The most basic shaders

So our program doesn't draw always draw triangles because we're missing shaders.  The code was updated so that it can load and use shaders, there just aren't any for it to load.  Let's fix that.

I'm not going to create anything fancy, just the most simple shaders to demonstrate the absolute basics.  I should mention that I just started learning about shaders a week and a half ago, so you can't really expect digital magic quite yet.

To Do list for 2014

I don't normally make new years resolutions, I never stick to them.  Maybe through the first few months I'll be good, but after that my attention drifts to something else and the old plan is soon forgotten.  I liked Alison's few simple goals for the coming year, and thought perhaps it might be time to try again.  Also since I'll have the promises documented it'll be a bit more motivation to actually stick to them.

So with that in mind, just what should I try to do this year?