c++

137 Articles

C Sharp Development 101 – Part 1: Hello World

September 30, 2010 by 50 Comments

In this tutorial we are going to get up close with the Visual Studio 2010 environment. We will learn how to make a console application as well as a form to display our hello world applications.  This will give us an opportunity to view 2 types of solutions of the many available in Visual Studio.  We will start making the console application first then progress to the forms application.

First we must  understand the development environment we are going to use.  On the far left side is the toolbox panel.  This panel gives us access to a lot of controls  that can be used by the Windows Forms.  Next is the Solution Explorer that will allow us to navigate the projects and files we are going to create in this Solution.  The Properties panel is directly under my Solution Explorer and will allow us to change properties of controls and of the form we will create later on.  If any of these are not being displayed they can be retrieved from the View menu at the top under Other Windows.  For more information on the Visual Studio IDE visit MSDN and search for the specific questions you are having.

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Auxiliary Scoreboard Reads Status Directly From Memory

September 13, 2010 by 28 Comments

[StaticChanger] built a scoreboard to display his kill statistics from Halo for the PC. Yes, we’ve seen kill counters before, but we like the way that he gathers the data. This project is reading the score directly from an address in memory.

Using a program called Cheat Engine, the memory used by a program can be sniffed. After a few passes, the program will help you find a static memory address for your desired data. Once you have that it’s just a matter of using a pointer to that address in your desired programming language. In this case, a C# program polls the value and instructs an Arduino to display the value on a couple of 7-segment displays. Voila, the number appears next to your screen as you see in the image above.

C Sharp Development 101 – A Tutorial Series

September 3, 2010 by 107 Comments

In this tutorial series we are going to look at C# Development using the Visual Studio 2010 Express editions.  This will take you from the basics of installing Visual Studio 2010 Express, to the Object Oriented Programming style associated with C# and other languages, dabble in some database access (Access & SQL Server Express) and finally, design a project that will pull all of our knowledge together into a final solution.

So You Want To Make A Command Line Interface

August 26, 2010 by 42 Comments

[Keba] not only asked Answeres.HackaDay.com, but also sent us an email as follows.

“Can you make a basic guide to designing a good Command Line User Interface?”

Wouldn’t you know the luck, I’m currently working on a Command Line type interface for a project of mine. While after the jump I’ll be walking through my explanation, it should be noted that the other replies to Answers.HackaDay.com are also great suggestions.

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PIC USB Host Shortcuts

April 8, 2010 by 11 Comments

[Simon Inns] is still hard at work making USB connectivity for PIC microcontrollers easier for the hobbiest. He’s released a framework for PIC based USB devices under Windows. It includes the firmware needed for USB compatible 18F PIC chips as well as a C# class library and example programs for the Windows side of things. This goes quite a bit further than his PIC-USB tutorial but with little added effort on your end of things.

We do our USB prototyping on a breadboard just like [Simon] did in this example. He’s got a nice little USB-B connector breakout that is easy to plug into the breadboard. If you prefer to have a more stable development area, check out the one he designed. It’s a single-sided PCB made for through-hole components with just a handful of jumper wires.

USB Oscilloscope

March 5, 2010 by 21 Comments

Here’s a USB oscilloscope project from a few years back. It’s easy to build on a single-sided PCB and very cheap because it uses just a handful of parts. At the center, an ATtiny45 microcontroller uses its ADC capabilities for the two traces and also handles the USB connectivity. The internal oscillator is used and trimmed up for accuracy by referencing the USB clock. On the PC side of things, a program written in C# displays the data coming over the serial bus. Quick, small, and useful; a schematic, board layout, firmware, and PC software sources are all available for download.

[Thanks Shri]

PHP Runtime Rewritten, By Facebook?

February 3, 2010 by 42 Comments

Yes, its true. Facebook has completely rewritten the PHP runtime to make it faster and more efficient, and its completely open source. Named HipHop, its described as a source code transformer, changing PHP into optimized C++ which is then compiled using g++. Thus keeping the best aspects of PHP while taking advantage of the performance of C++. Using HipHop, the Facebook web server CPU usage has been decreased by about fifty percent! And who would have thought that this and many other cool advances in programming, started at a Hackathon.