A code monkey in Research

Last time I had the basic Windows Store DirectX Doppler app working, and now it's time to add the shader. To begin, effects are applied to images, which means I need to draw the waves on to some off-screen bitmap, and then render that via an effect. I...

The Doppler waves program has two bits of UI really: the "dynamic" wave drawing part, and the user interaction part, namely the slider. I could recreate a slider myself, or use some other interaction mechanism in my C++ DirectX variant of the program...

Windows Phone 8 brings with it the ability for a program to set the lockscreen picture; there are already a bunch of apps in the store that cycle through images (including the built in ability to grab pictures from the Bing home page) - however, none...

A new version of the add-in is now available. The significant change is in the installation process, from plain (and simple!) ClickOnce to MSI, as described in my last post . The new version should load faster (for a start, Outlook 2013 doesn't wag...

A few people have been asking me for something akin to an MSI-based installer for my NoReplyAll tool but I've not been able to treat this as particularly high priority. Those of you with Office 2013 might have noticed Outlook pointing the finger of shame...

Last time , I talked about a WPF application to demonstrate the Doppler effect; this time I'm going to look at a Win8 app. The starting point is the C# Windows Store application project template, of course, and then almost exactly the same Xaml content...

Research Next is a chance for us at Microsoft Research Cambridge to show off some of the work we do - Project Colletta gets a brief outing at the most recent, held a couple of weeks ago. If you look carefully, you'll see that it's working with Office...

Professor Chris Bishop is well known round here for giving entertaining science talks aimed at young people - a few years ago he presented the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures . Every so often Chris pops into my office to talk about a bit of software...

Something that I find annoying is how many programs add items to the Windows Explorer "New" submenu ("New item" on the Windows 8 Explorer ribbon, or right click in the Explorer window and select "New") that I really never, or very seldom, want to create...

As I mentioned in an earlier post , Outlook 2013 brings a few new features which I need to integrate with in NoReplyAll ., the main one being ribbon changes when inline responses are used. The What's new for Outlook 2013 developers article describes...

A new version is now available for download: this one supports the Outlook 2013 preview, and includes a few changes to the handling of reply states of meeting requests. Outlook 2013 includes a missing attachment check, so I've disabled it in the...

Quite a while ago I presented a scrappy little macro I created to update version numbers in multiple Visual Studio projects. At the time I commented that Visual Studio 11 wouldn't be supporting macros so, now that VS2012 has RTM'd , here's a "port" to...

As I'm sure you've noticed by now, the Office 2013 Preview is now available . I've given my NoReplyAll Add-In a spin and it broadly seems to function as desired - three areas that need a bit of work are: It seems that Outlook 2013 includes a missing...

I've published a new version of the NoReplyAll Outlook add-in with pretty much the only change being the addition of a no-forward button to meeting requests. As indicated in a couple of previous posts , everything in the add-in until this point has...

The setting page for AppNap is a rather modified version of button list the main page: instead of clicking an entry to activate it, you click on an entry to be able to edit it. I think the politest thing I can say about my editing interface is that it...

The AppNap main page content is pretty much a grid with three elements - the search box, the list of search buttons, and an ad control. There's a picture of it in the first post in this series , and the Xaml looks like: <Grid x:Name="ContentPanel...

Following on from last time , I thought I'd start by describing the persisted data for AppNap , which consists of an ordered list of search shortcuts, and a search shortcut is a name (which appears in the list presented to the user) and a bit of text...

A new version of the add-in is now available - head to http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/60860f41-88ab-4bb4-8104-765feca9cfed/default.aspx to get hold of it. This is to fix a problem with misidentification of HTML embedded images as attachments...

When I go searching the web from a desktop browser, I'm lazy. I head straight to a search engine and type a short query: I can get away with a short query because the ease of browsing through a large set of results often outweighs the effort involved...

A new version of the add-in is now available - head to http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/60860f41-88ab-4bb4-8104-765feca9cfed/default.aspx to get hold of it. The once change since 2.4.0 is a bug fix for error messages appearing when you...

RJGray found another error in the NoReplyAll add-in : basically, visiting the Today Page causes the add-in to throw a bunch of exceptions which seem to be triggered by accessing the Explorer Selection when that page is showing instead of an Explorer ...

The last few blog posts have been a rapid walkthrough of our Facebook game . To wrap up, here's the "table of contents" for the posts: Game release annoucement Introduction - quick outline of technologies Server - description of the server...

I'm not really going to go into much detail about the client - it's fairly standard "modern" HTML and JavaScript about which you can find much better information that I could cover here. One reason why I can't say a lot about it is that pretty much all...

There are several ways to integrate your application with Facebook: you can have a standalone application (which uses Facebook for authentication but has a UI totally separate from Facebook apart from login), and there can be two flavours of that, a ...

A new version of the add-in is now available - head to http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/60860f41-88ab-4bb4-8104-765feca9cfed/default.aspx to get hold of it. Only two changes since 2.3.3: yet another button rearrangement, since the dropdown...