New Free Stuff

The smartest thing I did last year was to give something away. The result of putting the "Famous Yellow C# book" up on the blog has been a huge increase in traffic and thousands of downloads over the last few months.

Loads of people have been in touch saying how useful it has been to them. A number of courses are using it as one of their texts and it has even made its way onto the digital bookshelf of some leading software manufacturers. And of course quite a few new typos have been discovered....

I got a query today from someone who is moving from Java to C# and I remembered that some time ago I wrote some notes about this. I put them up on this site ages ago, but I've tidied the text up, converted it to pdf and put it in a coloured cover (this time orange). You can find the new material alongside the Yellow book on the same site:

http://www.robmiles.com/c-yellow-book/

Update on Friday, January 30, 2009 at 09:52AM by Rob

I've made some tiny changes to the text, and fixed some typos. It never looks good if you get the words wrong in the introduction.....

Microsoft Tag

Microsoft Tag is a new way you can put out links to web sites or whatever. The links are printed as patterns a bit like bar codes which you can read with your mobile phone camera. They use a cunning colour technology which means that even when they are snapped out of focus they can still be resolved into a readable address.

The tag for this blog.

The tags are linked through the Microsoft Tag site, which means that you can put expiry dates in them and the use of your tags is automatically logged so you can get reports on how much they are being used.

There are reader programs for most Smartphones including Windows Mobile, J2ME, iPhone, Blackberry and Symbian S60 devices. To work the phone needs a camera and of course internet access.

I'm thinking that when paired with a Polaroid PoGo printer, which prints sticky coloured prints just the right size for some text and a tag, this would be a very neat solution. I'm thinking about having a Tag treasure hunt at the next departmental bash. You can find out more about Microsoft Tag here.

Remembered the Camera

I remembered the camera this time.  The light wasn't quite as good, but I still managed one shot worth bothering with.

Hull Marina

Team Building Gets The Hardware

I got a lovely surprise today. The hardware for our Micro Framework entry turned up. And it is wonderful. It is one of the latest Tahoe II boards from Device Solutions. I installed the drivers, plugged it into the laptop and got my first program working in minutes.

My first program just displays a picture of the team (as well it might). Next step is to see if I can get the touch screen going, then I'm going to play with the Zigbee wireless networking(we also got a Zigbee adapter for the PC) and interface some sensors and, and, and.....

Good thing I've finished my marking.

Update on Friday, January 23, 2009 at 02:55PM by Rob

I've just discovered that to get the Zigbee board to work on the PC you need to have USB drivers for the carrier boards as supplied. You can find them here: http://www.digi.com/support/kbase/kbaseresultdetl.jsp?id=2138

Update on Friday, January 23, 2009 at 07:45PM by Rob

I've done some more playing. Some notes you might find useful if you are building something for this competition:

Don't try and build a Console application for the Tahoe board, for some reason it won't work.

The PC connection for the Zigbee board simulates a COM port (in my case it was COM17). This should be configured at 9600 baud, 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit. You will need a USB cable with the big connector on the back to power up the interface.

The Zigbee board on the Tahoe board is connected to COM2. When creating the SerialPort instance to talk to the Zigbee device you can just use the simplest version of the constructor, which just takes the name of the port to open.

I've made a couple of really simple programs that should get you started:

XBeeTest is a program for the PC that creates a COM port and implements a tiny terminal that will talk to a Zigbee board on the USB port. You can use Device Manager on your machine to find out which serial port the board is connected to (the program is set up to use COM17). The one button sends the AT command +++ to start a remote session. If all is well you should see OK appear in the TextBox. If you select the TextBox and type commands these will be sent to the Zigbee device and the responses will appear in the TextBox. This does not perform the actual network connection. You have to use the protocol described in the manual here.

MicroXBee is a program for the Tahoe board that connects to the Zigbee device and resets it. When you press the Select button in the middle of the keys the program creates a SerialPort and sends the +++ command and then displays the "OK" message that comes back. Again, it doesn't tell you how to do the comms, but it will get you started sending and receiving them. It assumes that you have installed the drivers for the board.

Marking Humour

I've spent the entire day marking First Year exams. It does funny things to your brain. Next time I'm in charge of an exam I'm going to make sure that one of us turns up dressed as a Red Indian, one of us as a construction worker, one as a motorcycle cop, one as a cowboy and so on. When we are asked what we are doing I'll just say...

"Oh, we're the Invigilation People"