GLUT with Visual Studio C++ Express Edition

OpenGL is one of the most popular graphics library nowadays, we may even say that it is already a standard. This article below explains how to use GLUT with Visual Studio C++ Express Edition:

This document details the steps to get GLUT working along with Visual C++ Express Edition.

1. Download and install Visual C++ Express Edition from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualc/default.aspx
2. The default install of Visual C++ Express Edition builds for the .Net platform. We'll need to build for the Windows platform since OpenGL and GLUT are not yet fully supported under .Net. For this we'll need the Microsoft Platform SDK.
3. Download and install Microsoft Platform SDK. Visual C++ Express Edition will need to be configured to build for Windows platform. All these instructions are available here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualc/usingpsdk/ (no longer valid, use http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/express/aa700755.aspx instead)
4. Now, we'll need GLUT. Download and unzip Nate Robin's Windows port of GLUT from here: http://www.xmission.com/~nate/glut.html
5. Add glut.h to the GL directory in the platform SDK/include.
6. In your Visual C++ Express Edition project properties -> Additional Linker Directories add the directory which has glut.lib
7. Add the glut.dll to the Windows System32 directory.
8. Your program which uses GLUT or OpenGL should compile under Visual C++ Express Edition now.

Say thanks to Ashwin Nanjappa!

   

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Interesting Article

Today I found an interesting article explaining .NET (Framework, SDK, IDE, etc). A nice explanation for anyone who wants to know more about .NET

Link: here

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What is the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0?

The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 (formerly WinFX), is the new managed code programming model for Windows. It combines the power of the .NET Framework 2.0 with four new technologies: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), and Windows CardSpace (WCS, formerly “InfoCard”). Use the .NET Framework 3.0 today to build applications that have visually compelling user experiences, seamless communication across technology boundaries, the ability to support a wide range of business processes, and an easier way to manage your personal information online. This is the same great WinFX technology you know and love, now with a new name that identifies it for exactly what it is – the next version of Microsoft’s development framework.

from .NET Framework 3.0 Community

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SharpDevelop 2 vs Microsoft Visual Studio Express

For those who are thinking about whether you'd like to choose between SharpDevelop 2 and Microsoft Visual Studio Express Edition, here is a comparison table between those two.

Hope it's useful :)

Taken from here

Feature	SharpDevelop 2.1	Visual Studio Express Editions
Code auto-completion	Yes	Yes
Code syntax highlighting	Yes	Yes
Windows Forms Designer	Yes	Yes
Web Forms Designer	No	Provided with Visual Web Developer
Code Coverage	Yes	No
Unit Testing	Yes	No
Languages Supported	C#, VB.NET, Boo	C#, C++, VB.NET, J#
Help documentation	No	Yes
Plug-in support	Yes	No explicit support for plug-ins however third party plug-ins can work with the Express edition.
Insert PInvoke Signatures	Yes	No
Testing Regular Expressions	Yes	No
Class View	Yes	Yes
Solution Explorer	Yes	Yes
Project and Solution File Format	MSBuild	MSBuild
Web references	Yes	Yes
Refactorings	Rename	Rename, Extract Method
Go to definition	Yes	Yes
Find References	Yes	Yes
Code generation	Yes. Not as powerful as Visual Studio's Code Snippet Manager.	Yes
Object Browser	Yes	Yes
Database Explorer	Yes. Lacking support for many database providers.	Yes
Publishing	No	Yes
Data Sources View	No	Yes
Add Data Source Wizard	No	Yes
Document Outline View	No	Yes
Resources	Local only	Local and project
ActiveX Toolbox Items	Partial - need to generate .NET interop library	Yes
Integrated debugger	Yes	Yes
Targeting different .NET frameworks	Yes	No
Code Completion for different .NET frameworks	Yes	No
Reporting	Yes	Yes through the report viewer plug-in
Task List	Yes	Yes
Error List	Yes	Yes
Database Designer Tools	No	Yes
Code conversion	Yes	No
Integrated NAnt support	Yes	No
Integrated WiX support	Yes	No
Integrated FxCop support	Yes	No
Navigation History	Yes	Yes
XPath Queries	Yes	No
Incremental Search	Yes	Yes
XML documentation preview and generation	Yes	No

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Implementing DAL with Microsoft Visual Studio.NET

DAL (Database Abstraction Layer) concept is extremely useful, especially when it comes to large applications. However, it has several drawbacks. One of them is that implementing a DAL might require a lot of time. Fortunately, there are some "tools" that allow us to cut the DAL implementation time required.

Microsoft Visual Studio.NET (VS.NET) itself gives a way to implements DAL in your application. As far as I know, VS.NET gives two way to access database. The first one is by accessing it through a SQL command, I call this direct database connection. The other way is by using ADO.NET. As ADO.NET provides several components to access databases, they are adapter and dataset. While adapter is dependent to specific database, dataset is completely transparent to any kind of database. VS.NET implements a dataset as a class that provide several methods to access database. Adapter works as an intermediate between database and dataset. Its implementation contains SQL queries relevant to actions (add, edit, delete) which are going to be invoked from dataset. Remember, this only work if you use database access with dataset manipulation and not direct database access.

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Creating a Restore Point Using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and C#.NET

I have tried to find a way to create a restore point in Windows, but no matter how hard I tried, I just can't find the one using C#, one of my favourite language. Sigh, I have to make one on my own :P Windows has something called WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation). It contains a huge classes and objects that allow programmers to do a lot of things, creating a restore point is just one of them.
Here is the source code to create a restore point in Windows:

ManagementScope oScope = new ManagementScope("\\\\localhost\\root\\default");
ManagementPath oPath = new ManagementPath("SystemRestore");
ObjectGetOptions oGetOp = new ObjectGetOptions();
ManagementClass oProcess = new ManagementClass(oScope,oPath,oGetOp);

ManagementBaseObject oInParams = oProcess.GetMethodParameters("CreateRestorePoint");
oInParams["Description"] = "My Restore Point";
oInParams["RestorePointType"] = 0;
oInParams["EventType"] = 100;

ManagementBaseObject oOutParams = oProcess.InvokeMethod("CreateRestorePoint", oInParams, null);

Hope this will be useful. Don't forget to add System.Management as a reference!

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Autonomous Object Tracking and Monitoring Using Video Processing

Object Tracking and Monitoring is about recovering object's parameters that related to it's shape, position, velocity, etc. This activity could be used for many things. For example: vehicle monitoring and camera surveillance. Autonomous Object Tracking and Monitoring is about making system that simulate human intelligence to do Object Tracking and Monitoring by using Artificial Intelligence. There are two kind of technology that can be used in implementing object tracking and monitoring: Treading & Scale and Image Processing. Despite its complexness, Image Processing has better potential to recover object's parameters to a whole different level than the Treading & Scale technology.

Image Processing technology can be relativily expensive or cheap (compared to Treading & Scale) depending on how it being used. Several issues that goes along with Image Processing technology are: Artificial Intelligence complexness, quality of input device, and machine processing ability. Here, we will only talking about Video Processing and algorithm strategy to implement Autonomous Object Tracking and Monitoring.

There are at least 6 challanges that have to be faced when implementing Autonomous Object Tracking and Monitoring:
- image substraction
- background generation and update
- region finding and filtering
- associating region
- region's parameters
- vehicle identification

I will talk about them later when I'm not too busy (haven't I told you that I'm quite bu...**cough**lazy**cough**? :P)

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