.NET news » Search results

I am developing a 4X Space Opera game called Star Odyssey, in the tradition of the Master of Orion series. Every game needs a User Interface and mine is no exception. The DirectX SDK provides a sample UI that looks very cool, but it is very difficult to extrapolate from the project and it relies on textured GUI elements. Since I am not very good at drawing GUI elements, it would have taken ages for me to go that way. Instead, I took the ''programmer art'' way: to create controls and other GUI elements in a dynamic way, trying my best to make it look cool at the same time. The result is presented here.

Simple memory game that uses shaped buttons.

At a minimum, a Mobile PC application is expected to efficiently manage the power needs, communication environment, inking and form factor constraints of the platforms it supports. This article shows how to easily incorporate ink awareness, power awareness, power awareness and size awareness into otherwise Mobile PC agnostic Windows Form applications, bringing then much closer to conformity as Mobile PC applications. The Mobile PC agnostic Windows Form application used for this demonstration is the VB.NET version of the Black Jack Card Game Starter Kit sample application with either Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition or Visual Studio 2005 as the development environment. The idea is to combine several distinct classes that manage screen size, ink, power and network connectivity separately into one Windows Form class that is easily inherited by a Mobile PC agnostic application. This article highlights some of the benefits of this approach.

With over 35,000 downloads of Nunit Framework per month, there is a noticeable trend that Test Driven Development and the values of having a set of Automated Tests are worth the price. Even Microsoft has joined the game and is distributing its own testing framework (we will actually use this framework in the examples of this article). There are many articles about Test Driven Development, but once you start writing tests, you will notice that you start to design your code to become testable. In this article, we will see that these techniques used to create testable code, unnecessarily make your code complex and thus hard to maintain. This is something which is opposite to the Test Driven Way of Creating the Simplest thing that will work.

The Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC) expands the market for PC games that run on Microsoft Windows XP, as long as developers consider certain design requirements to ensure a good user experience. In most cases, a single version of games can span both the UMPC and traditional PC platforms.

An article on how to use a game controller/joystick with C# and Managed DirectX.

Using Skype as infrastructure for multiplayer games.

An article on polygon collision detection. Can be used to implement collision between sprites in a 2D game. The algorithm can also be extended to 3D.

A cute and yet challenging game written in C#. Also hints on graphics, sound and simple class structures.

Slitherz is a variation of the snake game. It is a very clean and functional game written in C#.