Last week I attended the NEBytes technology user group for the first time. One of the presentations was for Twilio, an easy to use platform for creating SMS and VoIP applications. This short article demonstrates (with a simple caveat) just how easy it is to use this platform for sending SMS messages - a perfect way of adding two factor authentication to your services, or sending alert notifications, or any number of use cases.
Blog Articles and information on C# and .NET development topics
In this article, I'm going to take a quick tour of some of the static code analysis features of NDepend, a Visual Studio extension (and stand alone tool) for gathering metrics, detecting problems, and providing reams of information about your .NET projects.
Although I should really be working on adding the dithering algorithms into Gif Animator, I thought it would be useful to expand the repertoire of algorithms available for use with such tools. This article briefly mentions the expanded error diffusion algorithms that are now included, and in slightly more detail covers random dithering as well.
Another article in my C# image dithering mini-series, this time covering the Burkes error diffusion algorithm.
In my previous introductory post, I briefly described the concept of dithering an image. In this article, I will describe how to dither an image in C# using the Floyd–Steinberg algorithm.
When you reduce the number of colours in an image, it's often hard to get a 1:1 match, and so typically you can expect to see banding in an image - areas of unbroken solid colours where once multiple similar colours were present. Such banding can often ruin the look of the image, however by using dithering algorithms you can reduce such banding and greatly improve the appearance of the reduced image. This article briefly discusses dithering as a prelude to further articles with actual dithering implementations.
For some time now, I've started moving away from monolithic and complex GUI tools in favour of more streamlined command line interfaces. While Spriter is a fairly competent product in its own right, for some jobs it is just overkill and so this simple tool (with source available) was created.
We use batch files for... well, pretty much everything. From simple files that simple optimize modified graphics, to the tendril-like files that build our software. For some time now, I've been using cecho.exe from a CodeProject article so that I highlight errors and successes. Sadly this tool doesn't output anything if a console window isn't in use (for example from a CI server) and so I created a quick C# version for a direct replacement.
This post is a review (or possibly some long winded rambling) of the book Essential Algorithms: A Practical Approach to Computer Algorithms by Rod Stephens and published by Wiley.
The ColorGrid control is a fairly useful control for selecting from a predefined list of colours. However, it can take up quite a bit of screen real estate depending on how many colours it contains. This article describes how you can host a ColorGrid in a standard ToolStrip control, providing access to both the ColorGrid and the ColorPickerDialog, with some custom painting to show the active colour on the button to round it off.