Weekly Code-a-thon

Ok so the other day Steven tagged me on a coding challenge , challenge being to write up some code that people could use / Find interesting / just about anything that had to do with coding :) . Alas i do not have the time to do this daily so i decided to do it on a weekly basis.

On a second note i did not have the time to think up super cool as him and decided to just present a project that i am currently working on.
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Weekend Of Gaming

Never in my life before have i had so many new games to try out at one , and the feeling can only be described as leaving a kid in a candy store. There is so much to try out and they are all so good that you are just not sure which ones to try and end up doing nothing.

Well after much consideration on what to play i finally got down to play the new MKvsDC , overall it was good but some moves are just to damn hard to pull of using the xbox 360 controller .Next up was COD 5 which i had kind of played before because i was in the beta but that was multi player only , the single player was very nice , and playing it co-op with my brother just made all the more cooler. Finally i managed to get in some time with NFS Undercover , this was a sad game to say the least .To easy ,overly simplified  and well it just seems to be lacking that NFS touch from the previous games.

Games i still have left to play , Tomb Raider : Underworld , End War and mirrors edge . Hoping to play a bit of these after i have finished cod 5 and fallout 3 , at least i know this holidays is gona be over way to fast .

As soon as i get a chance to finish all the games i will write up a quick review , till then let me know what you think about any of these games.

~stalkerh

On Gears 2 and the bugs that you cant curbstop

The weekend is over and it has been one of the best weekends on ages , i managed to avoid all work where possible and get in the much needed time to finish Gears 2.

So onto the main topic , Gears 2 , this has been without a doubt one of the best games i have ever played in ages. A well thought out story line , great graphics , challenging AI and co-op play to mention a few things, all this comes together to form a great game that i find will be hard to defeat for some time to come.

Now while this game is absolutely awesome there were some downers in the game , at times they killed the mood , other time we just had to forward and go on. What i mean i all this is that even though the game is soo awesome it is killed at quite a few points by some really weird/serious bugs.

I will only point out the few that i could remember , since i did not video these bugs its a bit hard to make any conclusive proof of what causes them exactly. Nevertheless onto the first bug , some of the enemies in the game seem to ‘teleport’ , i.e. one minute my brother and i are busy putting the heat  on them laying down covering fire the next minute the unit is directly behind us and either I die or he dies , this particular bug happened a few times with the hell hounds where you see them for the first time (the first city that gets sunk)

The second bug that really annoyed me occurred only once because i did not want to really go back and test it. On the level in the nexus where you find Maria and jack is searching for her, during the time  in which you have to defend jack enemies keep on coming , unfortunately for us the enemies never stopped coming and when they finally did , i never got the cut scene and jack was no where to be seen , its almost as if he eloped with Maria. Since it was already so late i gave up for the night and started again the next morning. This time we finally got the cut scene and proceeded onwards.

The last majorish bug that i found happened quite a few times. Basically when i was playing single player till my brother arrived i played the game on hardcore and actually made some decent progress. But on hardcore death can sometimes come at really unexpected times. So what would happen is i would die a second before the cut scene , i would come back to life , the scene would trigger , and a few seconds later i would die in the middle of the scene. This became very annoying when i had to see small bits of a scene only to be ripped back to the land of reload last checkpoint once again.

The last few bugs that i got were really minor and i wont go into much detail , they ranged mostly from getting blasted into the scenery and getting stuck there to other small clipping problems.

Overall a very worth while game , if you don’t have this game yet , go and get it now !

~stalkerh

Making Web Dev A little easier

So i don’t think many people use Visual Studio for web page design and development besides us programmers , paticularly java script Dev.

Also i would just like to recommend to anyone reading this that if you want a nice studio to do web dev in aptana studio is brilliant and has great javascript and ajax support.

While MS did make a good effort with Visual Studio 2008 there was still a lot missing and a lot to be desired. Listening to the community they have now partnered to make working with jQuery a lot easier by providing a special visual studio file that can be added to Studio enable better code completion and the likes.

For me personally this is a huge bonus because i absolutely love jQuery and its hundreds of plug ins (Especially the interface plug ins) and the ability to add new plug ins just works so well.

Big kudos and thanks to MS and jQuery team for the update i know i appreciate it and will defnitly use it.

~stalkerh

Unit Testing and Subsonic

OK well the 2 are only ever so slightly related but it annoyed me enough that now that i have found the answer i feel i need to share it with all that might need the help.

Basically i have  the version of visual studio that allows you to generate unit tests from your code automatically , while this is all cool and interesting not to mention time saving, it never ever worked for me.

Now i have been trying to get this working for a while because manually writing unit tests can become quite time consuming , especially if you have a nice backlog of stuff that need to be tested. For the most part studio got it all right generating a project for me and allowing me to select my language of choice , but when ever it got to the part where i had to select my project that i want to generate code for , it would pop up with a error about a unresolved DLL (MySQL.Data 5.0.*) which was in the correct folder and was  referenced in my project correctly. What initially threw me off was the fact that i was able to compile and build my application yet i could not create the test automatically and they both referenced the same DLL.

Then in a moment of clarity it hit me , the DLL had not been added to the Gac . So a few dos commands later and voila i can now generate Unit Test Automatically :) .

Not sure how many people will find this useful but you never know.

~stalkerh