A quick update on this blog, I will be traveling for my job in the coming week for a few weeks and will most likely not have time to post anything. I will try to keep this blog updated as best I can in the next few weeks, but no promises. Once I get back I will continue on with my postings. Now on with this post ...
ok, so you don't need any WPF at all to actually control you computer using a wiimote, but everyone loves the simplicity of making and controlling a gui with WPF that we should use it anyway's! Plus, WPF is just cool. Anyway, using Brian Peek's Managed Library for the Wiimote (I used version 1.2.0.0) you can receive data from the wiimote about its IR coordinates (up to all 4 IR sensors now!) and all of its button states.
I'm sure almost everyone knows about the Nintendo wii. It uses a different type of controller that is a real ingenious piece of equipment. The controller is the wiimote that has some awesome sensors in it. Much more detailed information can be found at the WiiLi Wiki. There are links that describe what type of sensors the wiimote has and how it works. There are also links that describe the data the the wiimote passes to the wii.
Every WPF developer should come across these three tools at some point in their career. These tools are extremely valuable for debugging, developing, cleaning and optimizing WPF applications. I can't believe how many months I went without using these tools to their full abilities, but now I use them on a daily basis. Below is a brief description of each tool along with links to where you can download them.
Pistachio
If your just interested on the post topic feel free to skip this paragraph; just me talking about the past 3 months and what has been going on in my life. 3 months since my last post .... wow, life sure has been crazy. Not only with the holidays being crazy as usual, I also got married and went on my honeymoon!!! All of my tasks for the wedding just seemed to hit all at once and things got crazy from then on, until the wedding day of course.
Notice that when you use an expander and expand / collapse it that there is a jerkiness depending on the number of elements that you have in it. So to solve this problem you can animate the expand / collapse events that get fired to smoothly open and close. Easy, right?
Ever use the opacity property to give some eleme3nt a see-through effect? It's pretty cool the results you can get, but you can also run into some problems. For instance, you have some container of elements and you want to give that containers background a see-through effect. So apply an opacity of 0.50 to the container and your done! Well, not so fast.
Some of our hardware that we are currently using at work required time to fully charge up before it could be used again. After 'x' amount of seconds the signal would be fully charged and ready for action. Now the typical way that this could be presented to the user would be an on / off state where off is when the signal is not present or when it is charging and on when the signal is ready to be used. But, what about a progress bar! Just slap in a progress bar and bind its value to the signal and wa-laa, done.
