In part one of the mini game article series, I am going to show you how to create a very simple Pong game from scratch. The tools you will need include Photoshop (or any other painting program such as Paint.NET or even MSPaint), Visual C# 2005 Express, and of course the Xna framework.

First we need to create our project, to give us a home base for all of our work. Go ahead and fire up C# Express and create an empty windows project. I am going to call mine MGSPong for lack of any imagination or any better title. Once the project has been created, add a folder called “Content” and then another underneath that called “Textures.” This is where we will store out art, no matter how bad it may be!

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Hardware Instancing is an interesting topic that has quite a few uses. The idea of instancing is to use the hardware to generate transformed vertices to reduce draw call overhead. Now I know that sounded like a bunch of senseless technical jargon, and it was. In plain English, sometimes it is faster to let the GPU do all the work for us so the CPU can go off and do other work; and this is what Hardware Instancing does. This article covers how to setup a simple program that uses instancing to render a few rotating squares.

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One of the tasks I had recently was to get not only a web page into a SharePoint page but also pass in parameters from the Query String. Let’s say I am going to create the page at http://localhost/sharepoint/mypage.aspx in a normal way. In order to host a page inside that SharePoint page, we can use a Page Viewer Web Part, but this limits what can be done. Instead, we can create a custom web part to do the work…

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public class CustomWebPart : WebPart {
    public override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer){
        string rawUrl = Context.Request.Url.OriginalString;
        int index = rawUrl.IndexOf("?");
 
        string query = String.Empty;
        if(index != -1) query = rawUrl.Substring(index);
 
        writer.Write(
            "<iframe src='http://localhost/sharepoint/myOtherPage.aspx" + query + "' width='100%' height='765px'/>"
        );
    }
}

Every once and awhile I find the need to get a reference to a Type maintained in a separate assembly. This tends to happen when I am loading assemblies at runtime and am trying to build an instance of a known Type in that assembly. In fact, this is how my XmlProvider class builds instances. Well I have found that the built in System.Reflection.Emit.TypeBuilder.GetType(…) method does not deal well with these advanced situations. So here is a very inefficient, brute force method for getting the Type object you need. Also note that I have included some tags for cross-platform compatibility. I am still looking for a workaround for the Zune and Xbox 360.

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/// <summary>
/// Handles cross assembly type referencing by searching loaded assemblies for a type.
/// </summary>
public static class TypeBuilder
{
    public static Type[] GetBaseTypes(Type type)
    {
        List<Type> types = new List<Type>();
 
        Type t = type;
        while (t.BaseType != null)
        {
            if (t.BaseType == typeof(Object))
                break;
 
            types.Add(t.BaseType);
 
            t = t.BaseType;
        }
 
        return types.ToArray();
    }
 
    /// <summary>
    /// Gets the Type object for a specific type name.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="typeName">The type name to search.</param>
    /// <returns>A Type object.</returns>
    /// <remarks>Searches assemblies only loaded in the current application domain.</remarks>
    /// <seealso cref="System.Reflection.Emit.TypeBuilder"/>
    public static Type GetType(string typeName)
    {
#if ZUNE
        return null;
#else
        if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(typeName))
            throw new ArgumentException("Provided type name was invalid.");
 
        // Get a list of assemblies first...
        Assembly[] assemblies = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies();
 
        // Loop through until we find the type.
        foreach (Assembly assembly in assemblies)
        {
            Type t = assembly.GetType(typeName);
 
            if (t == null)
            {
                Type[] ts = assembly.GetTypes();
 
                foreach (Type type in ts)
                    if (type.Name == typeName || type.AssemblyQualifiedName == typeName)
                        return type;
            }
 
            if (t != null)
                return t;
        }
 
        // We may need to fall back on the built in builder.
        return System.Reflection.Emit.TypeBuilder.GetType(typeName);
#endif
    }
}