Re: Hosting XNA in a windows forms control and in turn hosting that control in WPF - .NET (Core and Framework) Discussion Boards

I write to inquire if there is a way to develop java code using VSTS 2008? Is there a snapin or compatible app that would allow this? Much thanks for an informed opinion.

You can use VS to write the code but would not have any intellisense or other support, just as would get with notepad. You would also need a suitable compiler.

I know the language. I've read a book. - _Madmatt

To add to Mark's comments, I have done this for a small project, but without the intellisense and keyword highlighting it is not a great experience. I would much rather use Eclipse or NetBeans as both are geared to Java development, whereas Visual Studio is not.

txtspeak is the realm of 9 year old children, not developers. Christian Graus

Hi everyone,

I'm so confused right now I'm hardly sure where to begin. I've been tasked with writing an application using MSMQ. Basically, the app listens to a file folder, notices when a file's been added, sends a message to a router queue which then figures out what to do and sends a message to the appropriate processing queue. The router queue is receiving messages and it seems to be sending them on to the processing queue but the processing queue never receives the message. I've tried everything I can think of to get this working but cannot seem to do so and have no clue why not. No matter what I try, the processing queue never seems to receive the message that was sent to it.

Here's how the main program creates the router object (this is the one that works):

Private Sub StartRouter(ByVal myNode As XmlNode)
    Try
        m_RouterQueueName = myNode.Attributes("queuename").Value
        TheRouter = New Router(m_RouterQueueName)
        AddHandler TheRouter.onRouterStarted, AddressOf LogActivity
        AddHandler TheRouter.onRouterMessageReceived, AddressOf LogActivity
        AddHandler TheRouter.onRouterError, AddressOf LogError
    Catch ex As Exception
        LogError(ex)
    End Try

End Sub

And here's the constructor in the router object:

Public Sub New(ByVal QueueName As String)
       Try
           m_QueueName = QueueName
           StartListening()
       Catch ex As Exception
           RaiseEvent onRouterError(ex)
       End Try
   End Sub

You'll notice that it has a "start listening" routine. Here is that routine:

Private Sub StartListening()
    myReceiveQueue = New MessageQueue(m_QueueName, QueueAccessMode.SendAndReceive, False, QueueAccessMode.SendAndReceive)
    Try
        'myReceiveQueue = New MessageQueue()
        'myReceiveQueue.Path = m_QueueName
        myReceiveQueue.Formatter = New XmlMessageFormatter(New Type() {GetType(System.String)})
        myReceiveQueue.UseJournalQueue = True
        RaiseEvent onRouterStarted("Router listening to " & m_QueueName, "Started")
        AddHandler myReceiveQueue.ReceiveCompleted, AddressOf MSMQ_ReceiveCompleted
        myResult = myReceiveQueue.BeginReceive()
    Catch ex As Exception
        RaiseEvent onRouterError(ex)
    End Try
End Sub

Now as to the processor (this is the part that's not working), here's how the calling program creates it:

Private Sub SpawnProcessors(ByVal myNode As XmlNode)
    Try
        For Each childnode As XmlNode In myNode
            Dim myNewProcessor As New Processor(childnode)
            AddHandler myNewProcessor.onProcessorStarted, AddressOf LogActivity
            AddHandler myNewProcessor.onProcessorError, AddressOf LogError
            AddHandler myNewProcessor.onProcessorMessageReceived, AddressOf LogActivity
            ProcessorCollection.Add(myNewProcessor)
        Next

        ' once we've been through all the processors and started them all, introduce this list to the router
        TheRouter.IntroduceProceduresToRouter(ProcessorCollection)
    Catch ex As Exception
        LogError(ex)
    End Try
End Sub

Since the router sends messages to the processors you'll see that I have a line in there that introduces the processes to the router. All this does is take the collection of processors and "copy" it to the router so the router can know what's going on (maybe the problem is in doing this???):

Public Sub IntroduceProceduresToRouter(ByVal myList As List(Of Processor))
     m_KnownProcesses = myList
 End Sub

The constructor for the processor object is like this:

Public Sub New(ByVal myNode As XmlNode)
    Try
        Config = myNode
        m_QueueName = myNode.Attributes("queuename").Value
        m_Type = myNode.Attributes("processtype").Value
        StartListening()

    Catch ex As Exception
        RaiseEvent onProcessorError(ex)
    End Try
End Sub

It also has a "start listening" subroutine associated which looks like this:

Private Sub StartListening()
    Try
        myProcQueue = New MessageQueue(m_QueueName, False, False, QueueAccessMode.SendAndReceive)
        myProcQueue.Formatter = New XmlMessageFormatter(New Type() {GetType(System.String)})
        myProcQueue.UseJournalQueue = True
        RaiseEvent onProcessorStarted("Processor listening to " & m_QueueName, "Started")
        AddHandler myProcQueue.ReceiveCompleted, AddressOf MSMQ_ReceiveCompleted
        myResult = myProcQueue.BeginReceive()
    Catch ex As Exception
        RaiseEvent onProcessorError(ex)
    End Try
End Sub

Now when the router receives a message, it reads it from the queue like this:

Private Sub MSMQ_ReceiveCompleted(ByVal p_source As Object, ByVal p_objAsyncResult As ReceiveCompletedEventArgs)
     Try
         Dim myMessage As Message
         myMessage = myReceiveQueue.EndReceive(p_objAsyncResult.AsyncResult)
         RaiseEvent onRouterMessageReceived("Router", "New message Received in Router Queue" & Chr(13) & myMessage.ToString)
         RouteMessage(myMessage)
         myResult = myReceiveQueue.BeginReceive()
     Catch ex As Exception
         RaiseEvent onRouterError(ex)
     End Try
 End Sub

And it uses the RouteMessage function to send a call to the proper processor (right now there's just the one and until I can get it to accept messages there's no use to add any more). But here's the RouteMessage sub:

Private Sub RouteMessage(ByVal msgToProcess As Message)
      Try
          ' get the XML from the body of the message
          Dim xmlDoc As New Xml.XmlDocument
          xmldoc.LoadXml(msgToProcess.Body)
          Dim myNode As XmlNode
          myNode = xmlDoc.SelectSingleNode("descendant::process")

          ' read the first child to determine what the next process is
          Dim NextAction As String
          NextAction = myNode.ChildNodes(0).Attributes("type").Value

          For Each SingleProcess As Processor In m_KnownProcesses
              If NextAction = SingleProcess.Config.Attributes("processtype").Value Then
                  'Dim myQueue As New MessageQueue(SingleProcess.myProcQueue.Path)
                  '                    myQueue.Send(myNode.OuterXml)
                  SingleProcess.myProcQueue.Send("Test Message")
                  'myQueue.Send("Test Message")
                  'myQueue = Nothing
                  'SingleProcess.myProcQueue.Send(myNode.OuterXml)
                  Exit For
              End If
          Next
      Catch ex As Exception
          RaiseEvent onRouterError(ex)
      End Try
  End Sub

As you can see in my for loop I've tried several different things. But nothing's working. I'm not even getting the processor to recognize the simple text message that I sent. No errors are being thrown that I can see... it's just not doing anything. I put a breakpoint on the processor's MSMQ_ReceiveCompleted subroutine and it never ever gets hit.

I saw an article somewhere in my research today that helped me find where the MSMQ queuing properties control panel is and it says that the message files folder, message logging folder and transaction logging folder is all the same one -- C:\Windows\System32\msmq\storage. I looked in there and opened what I found in notepad but can't read any of it.

How can I tell if the processor queue is even receiving the message at all? I'm so lost.

I hope someone can please help me understand what I'm doing wrong. I'd greatly, greatly appreciate it.

Denise "Hypermommy" Duggan

I want to print crystal Report(10.5).
Default Printer:"Microsoft XPS Document Writer".
I want multiple pages to print.
If a report contain 10 pages then each page should be repeated as per requrement.
The code is in vb.net.
gReportDoc.PrintToPrinter(2, True, 0, 0)

The above statement should print double the copies in browser,but i get single copy of each page.
Also instead of direct printing,if i done preview.10 copies r get displayed.Its fine.
But there is printing tool above in crystal viwer.In that dialogbox if i give there: No of copies=2,then also unable to get multiple copies in browser.
is there any printer setting problem..?
But my vb vode is working fine,ie multple pages get printed in browser. In which I have set CR.CopiesToPrinter=2.

Hello,

this is a long story. I will try to make it as short as possible, so please bear with me.

A while ago a friend and I started out to write something what you might call a browser game. The first version used ASP.net web pages and a nice three tier architecture. Along the way we felt that a game which more or less looks like a collection of forms is not really exciting. So we did away with the web pages and replaced them with a webservice and a windows forms client.

This was a bit better and also offered the advantage of buffering data on the client and doing some GDI+ based rendering. But there was still room for improvement. So why not host XNA in windows forms? This was not easy to do since WinForms are event oriented while an XNA apllication runs in an endless loop to render as many frames as possible.

In the end I came up with a WinForms control that featured the functionality of XNA's Game class. Under the hood a WinForms control still uses a Win32 window which XNA (or better: DirectX) needs as a rendering target. Also, I used the Application.Idle event to trigger the rendering of a new frame.

Well, WinForms still are a bit limited on the design side, so why not move on to WPF? So we went just ahead and based the client on WPF. The only problem is hosting XNA in WPF.

For starters we put our WinForms XNA host control in a WPF WinFormsHost and... nothing happened.

It turned out that the Application.Idle event never fires in a WPF application and so no rendering was ever done. So this is my first question here: Does anybody know an event or other means to replace this? I have a crude workaround by putting a timer with a short timeout period on the XNA host control which triggers the rendering. It works fairly well, but the rendering is not as smooth as it used to be.

Indeed, I would like to do away with the WinForms control entirely and replace it with a WPF control. The problem there is that DirectX needs a Win32 Window as rendering target. Do WPF controls still have Win32 windows under the hood or does anybody see another way to provide this in a WPF control?

You see, the whole thing goes over a few tables and benches, so I posted it here in the forum for the .Net framework. I hope you don't mind. And thanks in advance for the replies.

PS: The whole project, of course, is 'homework'. In the sense of doing this as a hobby at home. My bosses at work only want me to write boring business apps Big Grin | :-D

Hello

using WPF and XNA together seems to be a little tricky. I've seen two different approach for integrating XNA and WPF

XNA integration inside WPF

Integrating XNA with Windows Presentation Foundation

however these techniques are more like a hack than a reliable solution. if you need a GUI for your game I suggest you to have a look at NeoForce Controls

good luck

Yes, tricky is the right word. A GUI and a typical DirectX (or XNA) application do not have too much in common. The GUI application tries to use the CPU sparingly by handling events and idling most of the time. A DirectX application tries to get all the CPU time it can and make the best of it.

My approach to bringing XNA and WPF together resembles the second one you mentioned. The main difference is, that my control tries to replace XNA's game class and does not try to tweak it into accepting the control as render target.

The game originally was supposed to be a web application and still retains the behavior of a website because the client connects to the server over a webservice. This way it will certainly not be a hot action game. Most of the time there will still be some kind of forms and while we want a good design, we also value such things as data binding or our MVP libraries to keep the code short and orderly. A DirectX application will make those things more awkward and NeoForce still misses some controls we would certainly need.

The game is going to be something like the good old Master of Orion. The players will be exploring unknown planets and build colonies, research new technology. There will be trade, espionage, politcs and some strategic and tactical combat. But at no point will the player be shooting himself. Instead he will mashall his fleets, troops and commanders. In the end we need a GUI more than DirectX.

Let's say the player is looking at his colony. On a website we could display a grid with all buildings he has. Efficient, but not very appealing. Puzzling together some kind of image would be possible, but a little awkward. Rendering a dynamic image would be a little hard on the server and Microsoft does not recommend it because GDI+ is officially not safe to use in a web application.

Sending the information of the player's colony to a client is a more logical choice. We can then leave the work of visualizing the colony and its buildings to the client and also eliminate the need to send a large bitmap at every page request. Under WinForms we have to deal with some ugly flickering and sometimes a hard time when trying to get rid of the typical WinForms look, but GDI+ at least can efficiently compose a custom image. A static image may not be state of the art, but at least it is a custom image generated in no noticable time.

WPF was mage to allow rich means of designing and animating your GUI and there is no ugly updating and flickering, making the whole thing look much less old fashioned. We could also easily visualize things with custom images. So far, so good. But with XNA we can put together a scene of the planet's landscape and the player's buildings plus some little animations like drifting clouds or a landing ship.

The same goes for visualizing the star systems. The player will have quite a few controls to navigate and get information about the objects he sees. Again we could simply display a grid with all the boring facts. Or we could put together an image and let the player scroll through the system. With WPF we could also render and animate some spheres and put some textures on them. XNA will add full support of shaders and multi texturing and make the whole thing look far more interesting.

And, even more important, we are a bit tired of tearing everything apart and putting it back together in yet another way. We finally want to get down to business Smile | :)

Hello,

I have a full application suite of software (multiple dlls) that is launched from a single exe acting as a main menu. The applications within this suite can be launched from the main menu or from IE that tells the exe to launch a specific application. I want to change the way that IE is currently launching the apps (current method is embed a dll in an html page) to using create object. So have a com wrapped dll that will tell the exe to launch a specific app using mutex. This dll not only tells the exe to launch an app, it also will start the exe if it's not running already. My problem is when it has to start the exe, I'm not sure when the exe is fully loaded to start excepting launch requests(they go unheard or cause errors). I have tried to use flags that in my mutex i'm checking but with the complexity of mutex it's giving me false positives that the exe is ready. I'm tried loops but that results in a not responding of IE or the exe itself - the not responding goes away but I can't have that coming up each time it starts.

The main purpose for using mutex is to control multiple instances of the exe starting. If it's started via IE, it becomes a tray icon with the mainmenu being hidden only accepting launch requests from the browser. If the user then double-clicks on the desktop short cut, the 2nd instances tells the 1st instance to launch the main menu then it will accepting launch requests from both the mainmenu and the browser. So i'm trying to use the 2nd instance to tell the 1st instance to launch an application when the com wrapped dlls does a loadassemblyfrom but the 1st instance isn't fully loaded yet whenn the 2nd instance tries to tell it to launch an app.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to "poll" the exe to make sure its ready before I tell it to launch an app so that I don't run into these not responding messages? I've used setTimeout javascript code to poll but that either doesn't work or also causes the not responding.

thanks for your time
Nathan

'Never argue with an idiot; they'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.' ~ anonymous

'Life's real failure is when you do not realize how close you were to success when you gave up.' ~ anonymous

Hi all,

My boss asked me to research some kind of FTP component that can be dropped into our .NET project. I know .NET has native FTP functionality and he'd know that too so I can only assume he wants something "beefier". It needs to be able to download files from FTP based on a masked filename and possibly a masked path too (i.e., check all paths that match the mask). Of course, the more robust and the more it can do the better. Looking for something that doesn't have royalties attached either. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Denise "Hypermommy" Duggan

Maybe this? http://www.chilkatsoft.com/FTP-2-DotNet.asp[^]

Die Energie der Welt ist konstant. Die Entropie der Welt strebt einem Maximum zu.

I've found these to be useful, http://www.rebex.net/default.aspx[^]

I know the language. I've read a book. - _Madmatt

Thanks y'all... I'll be checking them out. Appreciate the quick responses!

Denise "Hypermommy" Duggan

Hello list, this is my very first question about .NET as I've started studying it only recently.
I've installed VS C# 2008 Express Edition and I wonder where to find .NET Configuration Tools (caspol.exe). It's generally mentioned to be reachable through Administration Tools, but it isn't there.

Someone says that the tool is shipped with .NET 2.0 SDK. Should I install it? How would this hurt my actual installations (VS 2008, .NET 3.5, etc.)?

thanks very much,
giovanni

Hello every one

I am having a hard time here
i am trying to find some info on how to make a fule gauge type control
can anyone point me in the right direction I am pretty good with corel draw so i can make a nice pictuer and a nice needle
and i am a little new at vb.net 2008

But i am having a hard time to find some info

Thanks in advance
Smile | :)

modified on Friday, February 12, 2010 10:43 AM

Take a look here[^] for some potential samples.

txtspeak is the realm of 9 year old children, not developers. Christian Graus

Hi Richard

Thanks i tryed that
That is nuts thare is every thing and you can do anyting but i fix it a little to complex for me hehe

Thanks
bob

Want to Update .Net Framework 3.5 to .Net Framework 3.5 SP1................please
send me link .............I just want to
update .Net Framework 3.5 to .Net Framework 3.5 SP1..........Not Complete installation of .Net Framework 3.5 SP1

Thankz in Advance

Dre@m is not th@t wh@t u see in sleep.Dre@m is the thing which does not allow u to sleep

Use Windows update, or go to the Microsoft .NET web site.

txtspeak is the realm of 9 year old children, not developers. Christian Graus

There's not a separate SP1 if that's what you mean. You'll have to download the whole lot. It will get downloaded in Windows Update btw.

Kevin

Hi,
I am getting an error while opning the project in visual studio 2005.The project is created in Visual Studio 2008.
I don't have Visual Studio 2008 right now.Please let me know that is there any Service Pack or any other way to do it.
Following is the error:
"This project cannot be opened form source control because it was created by a version of Microsoft Visual Studio that is incomplete with this one.
If this is the case, you may be able to open it from source control using that version of Microsoft Visual Studio, and then use Microsoft Visual Studio to open the local copy."

Thanks,
Abbas

Visual source safe issue, may be your server(network) machine is in OFF which contains the project

modified on Friday, February 12, 2010 4:56 AM

Found this here[^].

How can I disable the integration between VSS and Visual Studio?

Under the registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\DevStudio\6.0\Source Control (for Visual Studio 6.0) or HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\DevStudio\5.0\Source Control (for Visual Studio 5.0) , change or created the entry:
Name: Disabled
Type: REG_DWORD
Data: 0x1

Me, I'm dishonest. And a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest.
Honestly. It's the honest ones you want to watch out for...

Hi,

I am developing a project in which i need to find the size of image and convert it into inches/cms/mts.
Can anybody help me to convert the pixels size to other units in VB.net

Thanks in advance

dileep2009 wrote:
in which i need to find the size of image and convert it into inches/cms/mts

You'd need to determine the DPI[^] of the medium that this image is going to. Then you'd count the pixels; you could determine the size in inches with those two values - and convert it to centimeters or meters if required Smile | :)

I are Troll Suspicious | :suss: