These are programming specific articles that will be published to CodeProject. They should be complete tutorials with code examples for you to use!
If you're building a 2D game in Unity3D, odds are you've come across the TileMap component. The TileMap is a powerful tool that allows you to create a grid of tiles that you can render your tiles with instead of hand-placing individual game objects with sprites. It has a host of built in functionality that you might otherwise find yourself manually writing, like mapping coordinates to particular cells on a map. And what's even cooler about using a TileMap? You don't need to handroll your own editor to paint tiles! I think I'd pass on having to do that. But have you found yourself in a situation where you want to get all of the painted tiles on a TileMap? You may have found it's not quite as obvious as you'd have hoped! What We Have To Work With On…
Here's a super quick peek into unit tests compared to functional tests. And full disclaimer here is that depending on your circle of influence, these might be given slightly different names. Try not to dwell on that but instead the comparison and contrast presented! Unit Tests Coded tests that take a white-box visibility approach to exercising and asserting that written code, generally a specific function/method, works as it was designed. Pros: Generally very programmer-focused Very granular coverage (breaks can identify exact lines where an issue occurs) (Should) run extremely quickly Have very little test setup in ideal cases Provide full control (generally via ‘mocking’ dependencies) to exercise very specific logical paths Cons: Generally more challenging to convey coverage to other stakeholders By nature these are brittle and break with refactoring Require sets of design patterns to help ensure tests are…
As I've been trying to get more YouTube content put together more steadily, one of the themes I'm interested in is doing some behind-the-scenes of the role playing game (RPG) I'm making with some friends in Unity3D. I've found that being able to work on an RPG outside of my regular day job is a really awesome way for me to keep up on my technical skills. I love coding, and the further along I move in my career as an engineering manager, the less time I actually spend writing code myself. I pride myself in being a technical engineering manager, so for me working on this RPG is a great outlet for creativity and practice. I mentioned this in my LinkedIn post here: Persisting Game Objects Across Maps In this video, I focus on one of the challenges the…
If you're like me, trying to create user interfaces in general is a challenge. So when it comes to working in tools that you're less familiar with, that challenge basically grows to a level where it's a roadblock. For me, trying to create user interfaces in Unity3D is basically the perfect example of hitting this roadblock! That's not to say the UI tools that are available in Unity3D are bad, but my skill level is essentially reset to zero when working with these tools. Fortunately I came across this little gem called Noesis GUI that enables WPF inside of Unity3D! I plan to do a few updates on this either via YouTube or short blog posts, but NoesisGUI has essentially unlocked my ability to create user interfaces inside of Unity3D. You can find my intro video here, or watch it…
I love dependency injection frameworks ever since I started using them. Specifically, I'm obsessed with using Autofac and I have a hard time developing applications unless I can use a solid DI framework like Autofac! I've recently been working with Xamarin and found that I wanted to use dependency injection, but some of the framework doesn't support this well out of the box. I' was adamant to get something going though, so I wanted to show you my way to make this work. Disclaimer: In its current state, this is certainly a bit of a hack. I'll explain why I've taken this approach though! In your Android projects for Xamarin, any class that inherits from Activity is responsible for being created by the framework. This means where we'd usually have the luxury of passing in dependencies via a constructor and…
I've found myself with some additional time to be creative during the great COVID-19 and lockdown/quarantine days. That's why there's more blog posts recently! Actually, I wanted to take the time to experiment with some unfamiliar technologies and build something. For a project, I wanted to leverage authentication but I'm well aware that user management can become a really complex undertaking. I had heard about Firebase from Google and wanted to give it a shot. For the purposes of this discussion, Firebase would allow me to create something like an OAuth proxy to the system I wanted to build, and by doing so, would end up managing all of the users for me. What I needed to do with Firebase to get that setup was actually quite straight forward. First, you start off in typical fashion registering for Firebase. From…
Background Thalmic Labs has started shipping their Myo armband that allows the wearer's arm movements and gestures to control different pieces of integrated technology. How cool is that? My friend and I decided we wanted to give one a whirl and see what we could come up with. We're both C# advocates, so we were a bit taken back when we saw the only C# support in the SDK was made for Unity. We decided to take things into our own hands and open source a Myo C# library. We're excited to introduce the first version of MyoSharp! The underlying Myo components are written in C++, and there's only several functions that are exposed from the library that we can access. In order to do this, we need to leverage platform invocation (PInvokes) from C# to tap into this functionality. Once you…
A few months ago I wrote up an article on using PyTools, Visual Studio, and Python all together. I received some much appreciated positive feedback for it, but really for me it was about exploring. I had dabbled with Python a few years back and hadn't really touched it much since. I spend the bulk of my programming time in Visual Studio, so it was a great opportunity to try and bridge that gap when looking at something like IronPython. I had an individual contact me via the Dev Leader Facebook group that had come across my original article. However, he wanted a little bit more out of it. Since I had my initial exploring out of the way, I figured it was probably worth trying to come up with a semi-useful example. I could get two birds with one…
Yield: A Little Background The yield keyword in C# is pretty cool. Being used within an iterator, yield lets a function return an item as well as control of execution to the caller and upon next iteration resume where it left off. Neat, right? MSDN documentation lists these limitations surrounding the use of the yield keyword: Unsafe blocks are not allowed. Parameters to the method, operator, or accessor cannot be ref or out. A yield return statement cannot be located anywhere inside a try-catch block. It can be located in a try block if the try block is followed by a finally block. A yield break statement may be located in a try block or a catch block but not a finally block. So what does this have to do with API specifications? A whole lot really, especially if you're dealing…
Background: Lambdas and Why This Example is Important Based on your experience in C# or other programming languages, you may or may not be familiar with what a lambda is. If the word "Lambda" is new and scary to you, don't worry. Hopefully after reading this you'll have a better idea of how you can use them. My definition of a lambda expression is a function that you can define in local scope to pass as an argument provided it meets the delegate signature. It's probably pretty obvious to you that you can pass in object references and value types into all kinds of functions... But what about passing in a whole function as an argument? And what if you just want to declare a simple anonymous method right when you want to provide it to a function? Lambdas. So…
