Friday, August 26, 2005

Code Snippets in Whidbey Beta 2

.NET Beta 2.0 now has this auto completion for common code blocks like 'if', 'try' , 'for', 'while' etc. All you have to do is type the first few words and press tab twice, first to confirm the keyword and then to type out the remaining code block.

example type try -> select try from the intellisense list by hitting tab and hit the tab key again to generate the whole try catch code block.

The code snippets can also be generated by selecting the "Insert Snippet..." option in the text editor context menu. This has lots more code snippets and one of my favourites is the property snippet. Select a type and a variable name and choose the prop snippet from the "Insert Snippet..." option, Voila you get a complete property,
Now isnt that cool .

Sunday, August 21, 2005

Beginning 3D Game programming

God its been ages since I last blogged, it seems I am too lazy to type a few words.
Well the last time I was working on game programming I got Tom miller's book
Beginning 3D game programming
. I must say that I got a fair distance using this book. It does get you up to speed but for that you have to be familiar with game programming and must know a bit about DirectX. I am inclined to say that this would help you a great deal if you have worked on DX7 using VB6 (coz thats what I tried before). This book does not cover the maths of game programming, you will need another book for that. Also this is more of a hands on approach. It assumes that you have last summers DirectX SDK update (included in the accompanying CD) installed on your PC to run the games. But if you are using the latest SDK the programs do not compile as some of the mouse & key events have to be rewired to work with the Windows forms events. All in all I would rate this 4* and would definitely recommend this to anyone wanting to get started with 3D and directX. I would also suggest that they have some basic maths for game programming and oh dont forget the sprites (images) that will be needed for the animation and characters. This book does not explain how to create them. You would therefore need to get them from the net or create your own with Maya or other graphics software