Off Topic...

We've just returned from the Edinburgh Festival, and my, what a splendid event it is. Not a cheap couple of days at all, in fact, quite the opposite, but a fantastic experience. If you're into drama, comedy, music or dance, or some combination, or all, of the above, it's got to be on your agenda. And if you're not, Edinburgh's a magnificent city so if all else fails you can drink in the architecture and the palpable buzz.

One lingering thought is that technology has pretty much failed to invade the world of art. We saw some plays which included video, and that was it. As a token, LED spotlights are everywhere, but that's hardly the point.

Of course there isn't much of an intersection between the arts and geek communities, but when you look at the presentation of a pop group from thirty years ago - drums, guitars, microphones, singers - and you look now, nothing much has changed.

Technologically we have the ability to create a much richer experience for the audience, and the tools are there (Vixer anyone?), and undoubtedly the creativity is there too, so where's the fusion?

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to devise a new art form that exploits the ubiquity of graphical technologies. If you take your show to Edinburgh next year, let us know eh?

ASP.NET- Unable to Start Debugging

We've been around ASP.NET since it was a baby, and have lost track of the number of times we've seen the pesky "unable to start debugging" message from Visual Studio. There are a zillion things that can cause it, and about two years ago we found the zillionth and first - one of the Windows updates hijacked a critical file.

Two years is a long time, and having just encountered yet another dead stop, we've just had to go through the whole sorry process again, to rediscover the same issue.

If you're at your wits' end with the self-same message, take a look at your "hosts" file (no, we didn't know we had one either)...

It's in the snappily-titled c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc and it's called simply "hosts" - it doesn't have a file extension. You'll need to be running as the administrator to mess with it (or right click on Notepad and take the "run as administrator" option) and inside (apart from some comments) you'll find the line:

127.0.0.1 localhost

and you may or may not find a second line:

::1 localhost

That second line may have been trashed - if it ain't there, add it in and save the file, and savour the joys of being able to create a new ASP.NET web site in IIS and debug it once again. Yip, it sounds like science fiction, but it's true.

We're a little unclear on the significance of it (and if anyone finds a human-readable piece on what on Earth an IPv6 loopback is do let us know). We're client-side graphics geeks, not server-side infrastructure boffins, and we're also sure there are good reasons for the horrific complexity of web site infrastructure. Okay, we're not at all sure there are.

In passing, if you ever wondered how the string 'localhost' became associated with the IP address '127.0.0.1', it's because of this file. You can add extra entries here too, so if you wanted to associate 'www.Vixer.co.uk' with '127.0.0.1' as well, you'd add an extra line into this file.

We have a side project running which is all about making the massively complex digestible through the use of graphics, and while it was never designed to deal with things that have grown up through the tangled machinations of standards bodies combined with knee-jerk reactions to unanticipated threats from hacker vermin, sprinkled liberally with dollops of glue to deal with its own ghastly legacy, it would nevertheless be an interesting exercise to try to go from "it's like this" to "and this is why". Still, we're ranting now...

Gone Quiet?

Yip - we've been quiet for a little while... it's the Summer so we're dodging the rain clouds and traffic jams in search of a photon of sunlight. In between, we're working on a build for a specific customer (nope, we can't tell you) but some of the goodies that are going into that will find their way into the mainstream product which is exciting.

We're also testing under Windows 7 (which went live just at the tail end of last week) and thus far all is well. One opportunity Windows 7 gives us is to do away with the need to grab video frames from the screen - there was a bug in previous versions of the .NET Framework that pushed us down that route and in theory it's fixed now. Hence we'll be looking into a Windows 7 version (or, rather, a .NET 4 version) in parallel with the XP and Vista version that's running wild out there now.

Exciting times....

Whaddya Think?

A request that comes up from time to time is for a way to make it easier to track over selected points in a picture - imagine a wedding photo where you'd want to fly the camera over each of a number of faces, zoom in and then zoom back again, effectively defining a flight path over the image.

You and we know you can do that today by stringing together several of the 3D Effects, but one school of thought says that's a bit fiddly, while the other says if we add a special way of solving that one problem we'll make the interface more complicated and hence scarier.

It's the age-old debate between power and ease-of-use - do we make it clever, or do we make it easy? Let us know where you stand - it's your choice....

What is it? We love Sony and we love XP... but....

Calling all Vixators (we really need a name as a community - not sure that's a good one) - what IS that issue with XP and video from Sony cameras? If you've seen it and can repro it, we'd be very pleased to hear and we'll pay handsomely (we lied about that bit) for a sample video that causes The Bug to stir from its slumbers.

Dear Bug... you is toast dude - the Vixators is on your case....

Sweet Sixteen

We've just posted another Vixer build onto the web site - it fixes an issue to do with the geeky post below - we weren't able to capture video on non-Aero Vista variants (e.g. Vista Basic) before, and now we can.

Just in case it's bothering you, the build is tagged "Stage16", hence "sweet sixteen"!

Detecting Aero

Bit of a geeky post this, but it took us a while to find any reference to how you'd work out (in a program) whether a Vista PC's running the Aero theme or not.

It's important to Vixer because if Aero isn't running we can't capture video against a transparent background, so some of the loveliness of our user interface gets nibbled away. The same's true on XP too.

It's worth adding that Plan A wasn't to capture video by taking a snap-shot of the desktop (which is what we do now) - in theory there's a better mechanism that uses WPF's RenderTargetBitmap, but it leaks memory even in .NET 3.5SP1. Our friends at Microsoft tell us it's fixed for .NET 4.0 and we'll find out when we look at Windows 7.

So... what's different between two PC's, one running the Windows Vista Basic "color scheme" and one runnning the Windows Aero variant?

It's all down to registry settings - if you look at:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM\

...the Composition and CompositionPolicy fields are set to 1 and 2 (respectively) for Aero, and both are zero otherwise.

If you want to know how to get at those from Managed Code, there's a great piece here.

Let us know if you plan to go to Windows 7 from the off - there are some features that will help us so we may do a Vixer that's specifically for Windows 7. It's only months away now and we're reading great things about it!