Best Flight Ever to Seattle

The lady in the red blazer came up to me as I was standing in line to check in for the flight. “Would you like me to find you a seat with more legroom?” she asked. Would I??? With a flourish of boarding passes I was moved to a seat that they had been keeping for tall people. Wonderful. The flight itself was very smooth and much shorter than expected, so I arrived feeling, if not as fresh as a daisy, certainly not as the crushed flower I thought I’d be. Hmm. Perhaps I’d better work harder on my similes in future.

Anyhoo, during the flight we had a good view of the coast of Greenland, and so I took some snaps. I’m here for the MVP summit which starts on Monday, in the meantime I’ve been meeting up with people I know and forgetting to remember their names. Great fun.

Friday Tutorial Fun

Friday at 5:15 pm is not really an auspicious time for a programming tutorial, but we do our best. Considering the horrible hour there was a pretty impressive turnout today,  and we did have fun. We were drawing text with XNA and playing with multiple draw operations to get fake 3D effects.

Great fun. Hull students, you can find the clock code in the lecture content for week 4.

Programming Puzzler

Quick test for all you programming experts. Will this stupid code compile?

public int InfiniteLoop()
{
    while (true)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Loopy");
        System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000);
    }
}

Note: All the namespaces are in place and the WriteLine and the Sleep are perfectly legal calls.

Update on Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 05:54PM by Rob

Turns out that it compiles just fine. The compiler is smart enough to work out that the method will never complete because it contains an infinite loop. This means that although the signature of InfiniteLoop defines it as returning an integer the compiler just says "Since the method never ends I'm not going to worry about it not returning a value when it says it should".

I'm not sure I agree with this behaviour. I saw it in the lab this morning and it surprised me. I would expect at least a warning, in case I'd put a loop in when I didn't mean to. 

The compiler doesn't fail to compile programs containing unreachable code either, although this does produce a warning.

More Open Day Fun

This is the lucky prize winner from the Open Day today. We had another great crowd.

These are some of them. Thanks for coming folks, hope you learnt something from the trip. I was asked if I had any ideas for things to do over summer to prepare for starting a Computer Science course. So I though I’d put some thoughts together.

First thing is to make sure you get good grades in your exams in summer. I’d hate to think that time spent playing with computers caused to you fail those.  But once you’ve done your exams I’d advise you to get hold of an introductory text on programming and have a go. You can get our First Year course here:

www.csharpcourse.com

There are links to my Windows Phone programming notes and also a version of my XNA book which you can download. If you are still a student I’d advise you to head off to Dreamspark and get hold of some free software. If you are not a student you can get free versions of Visual Studio here:

http://www.microsoft.com/express/

I wouldn’t try to do too much, but I would read the yellow book and try to get a feel for programming and what it is all about. A clue: it is not really mathematics, it is more about organisation.

Free Autodesk Software for Students

This one is worth knowing about. If you are a student who wants to create things like 3D models for XNA games you can now get Autodesk software, including AutoDesk 3D, for free from those lovely people at Autodesk. The over also extends to academic staff. Wonderful stuff. Find out more here:

http://students.autodesk.com/