There were no entries for Challenge 54 but I've decided to leave it open in case anyone wants to enter. I've also updated next month's challenge (56) with the boards.txt. That starts on March 1st.

Challenge 55 is now live.

Challenges Updated originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Friday, February 10th, 2012 at 17:16:08.

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My spare time activities include developing a multi-player web game, based on the Play-By-Mail principle (I worked in that industry full time for over two years, some twenty odd years ago). Online the principle is that turns are entered via a website, stored in a database then processed by a separate application that updates the database. The My Experience with a VPS article I penned last week is part of the same project.

The server side logic for the website is done in PHP because I'm not very keen on ASP.NET (Maybe MVC but certainly not WebForms), but it occurs to me that for as long as I'm using a Windows Server I could experiment with Phalanger especially as there is a VS2010 Addin. It's not for speed; even PHP running on .NET generates a complete web page in between 100 microseconds and 1 millisecond and that includs running queries against the database. It takes longer to compress the output and send it to the browser which then decompresses it. That takes a whole 800 milliseconds but probably it's quick because I'm only located 22 ms ping time from the server.

Phalanger looks interesting though and their website is worth checking out if you're doing things in this space. I'd mentioned Phalanger before as a technology that interested me and now I might find a use for it.

Maybe Time to Visit Phalanger Again? originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Wednesday, February 8th, 2012 at 14:56:37.

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This is an open specification and Microsoft encourage anyone to implement the C++ AMP (Accelerated Massive Parallelism) open specification on any platform. The idea is to make GPU acceleration of your program as easy as possible. That means just one include:

Then add specific key words, types like accelerator (a class representing a device that can do GPU like acceleration). Note that although this is C++, it can be accessed (as unsafe code) from C# and no doubt managed code sometime in the future.

It's been out in preview form along with the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview for quite a while but releasing an open spec is encouraging. At 135 pages, it's not exactly a quick read. If you have downloaded the Visual Studio 11 Preview, you can try out some of the 18 AMP Sample projects.

Microsoft Publishes Open Spec for C++ AMP originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Tuesday, February 7th, 2012 at 16:43:52.

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Back in the Window 98/NT days there was a part of the registry that couldn't be accessed through normal access. However if you ran an executable under the At command (to run it at a certain time), it seemed that At ran processes at system level and could access that part of the registry.

Quartz.net reminded me of that, not because of secret registry access but as a way of scheduling tasks. Linux systems have Cron to let them run a process whenever but apart from AT and later on the Task Scheduler (which can be a little fiddly), you need to roll your own. Or you could try using Quartz.net which is a.NET implementation of the Java Quartz project.

It uses a database to hold the scheduled jobs, and works with SQL Server,sqlite,postgreSQL, MySQL and Oracle. It isn't quite fully released at version 1.0 but beta 2 came out about a month ago so it can't be far off.

Scheduling Tasks with Quartz.net originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Monday, February 6th, 2012 at 16:37:46.

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I bit the bullet and committed myself to a monthly £30 (about $45) bill for VPS hosting last week for online game development.

The last couple of days though have seen me wrestling the beast into submission, ready to start developing and running my software on it. You think you can just use it, as it comes set up? Well in theory yes, but in practice, as you'll see if you read My Experiences with a Windows VPS, it's not always that easy.

For the last three months I'd been steeling myself to go Linux and lo and behold a cheaper Windows VPS came out of the blue and so I took the easy path. I've written a few websites in the past based on PHP and MySQL and though I'm sticking to PHP, I'm using C# and PostgreSQL with it. This technology stack could just as easily run on Linux so it's a very elegant piece of fence sitting!

VPS hosting only commits you to one month at a time, so it's entirely possible that I may still go Linux in the future.

Having Fun with a VPS originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Sunday, February 5th, 2012 at 17:20:53.

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The Speakers include the creator of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup, C++ Standards Committee Chair: Herb Sutter, the C++ template expert: Andrei Alexandrescu, STL master Stephan T. Lavavej, LLVM/Clang developer Chandler Carruth, distributed and parallel computing expert Hans Boehm, and C++ library design expert and ISO committee member Andrew Sutton.

It started yesterday and carries on today Feb 3. Watch it on Channel 9.

Live C++ Conference originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Friday, February 3rd, 2012 at 08:46:47.

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It's a bit more graphically intense than I'm used to so I had to do a bit of work in preparing the solid graphics for it. I created a single 320 x 320 asteroid and then created 23 other rotations of it, each one 15 degrees on from the previous. I think it's much better to pre-rotate than trying to do it in code. You might still pre-rotate the graphics when the game loads if you have got good rotation code. It's such a CPU intensive operation, it would be folly to do it at run time while playing the game.

So that still leaves 24 graphic images to manipulate. It would be posible but a bit of a pain supplying all the graphics in individual files. It makes more sense though to put all 24 on a single graphic image, laid out at regular spaces so making it easier to blit them in the game. Laying them out is a little tricky so I whipped up a quick utility in C# to do the trick. I've written it up with full source code. Enjoy!

Asteroids Tutorial is Coming Along But originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 at 17:19:14.

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A program written in C++ created this lovely piece of art work. However the art work wasn't coded in C++ but in a language that's interpreted by a C++ application. It's called Context Free, which if you've done Computer Science you may know from Context Free Grammar. Backus-Naur Form (BNF) is a popular notation for context free grammars.

Context Free is a digital art program that takes a description of an image and generates the image (as a bitmap, vector image, or movie). The description is in the form of a context free grammar and is called a cfdg file (aka context free design grammar). You can see examples of work on Youtube or on the site's Gallery, where the image came from.

Context Free is cross platform (windows, Linux and Mac). It produces some beautiful images, so if you want to learn a new programming language...

Creating Art Programmatically originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Tuesday, January 31st, 2012 at 14:49:47.

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I've mentioned Google's Native client before, and thought I'd take a look and see how easy it is (or not!) to get started. It's quite involved when you consider it requires these technologies: cygwin, python, subversion, git, nacl_sdk, naclports, depot_tools and that's before even writing a line of code.

So I've started working my way through these and writing them up as a How to Set Up to Develop Native Client Apps in C and C++.

After nearly a thousand words I hit a snag with a version clash in the Subversion client. Once I've resolved that, I'll carry on and get Super Snake working with Native Client.

Meanwhile if anyone else has hit this Subversion client is too old error (it's not!) and yes I have seen the error message on the Apache Subversion website, let me know how you fixed it!

Setting up for C/C++ Native Client development originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Sunday, January 29th, 2012 at 15:36:39.

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There was a slight bug in tracks.txt which I've amended so hopefully it will be a little bit easier (the track join without a switch at line 10, column 47) and because the month end isn't on a Sunday, the deadline is extended to the Sunday after. That's February 5.

If you want a copy of the current ISO standard you have to pay a few hundred Swiss Francs. However the draft of the next one (Look for the N3337 link) is similar and can be downloaded free.

A couple of Notes Incl Challenge 54 originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Friday, January 27th, 2012 at 17:30:05.

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