tommy.blog

At this website, you can download videos of the presentations that were held at the Lang.NET Symposium, <quote> a forum for discussion on programming languages, managed execution environments, compilers, multi-language libraries and integrated development environments </quote>.

I particularly liked Anders Hejlsberg's presentation about LINQ and C# 3.0.

I've created a mobile version of my Calctor application. It runs on Windows Mobile 5, and uses the exact same calculation engine as the desktop version. You can download it here.

I've updated my calculator tool to version 2.0:

• Fixed some bugs in the snippets
• Refactored the code, so I could extract the calculation engine into a separate library that can be shared with Calctor Mobile.
• Updated the visual style, and the icons
• Added a new option: Don't ask to save changes
• Changed the parser: the leading zero is now optional (you can use .75 instead of 0.75)

You can download it here.

This post contains all the information about Calctor and Calctor Mobile. It's always accessible from the software category, and will be updated with each new version of either Calctor or Calctor Mobile. The source code for both version can be downloaded from the Channel 9 Sandbox.

Calctor 2.1.2

Calctor is an advanced calculator with a simple interface. You have an input-region where you enter your calculations, and an output-region where the results of your calculations automatically appear while you're typing.

Download: Calctor.zip (643 KB)

Version History

• 27 May 2006: Calctor 1.0
• 28 May 2006: Calctor 1.1
• 3 June 2006: Calctor 1.2
• 10 June 2006: Calctor 1.3
• 17 September 2006: Calctor 2.0
• 28 December 2006: Calctor 2.1
• 1 July 2007: Calctor 2.1.1
• 28 July 2009: Calctor 2.1.2

Calctor Mobile 1.1

Calctor Mobile is the mobile version of Calctor. It runs on Windows Mobile 5, and uses the exact same calculation engine as the desktop version of Calctor. To run Calctor Mobile, you need to install .NET Compact Framework 2.0, which you can download here.

Download: CalctorMobile.zip (207 KB)

Version History

• 17 September 2006: Calctor Mobile 1.0
• 29 December 2006: Calctor Mobile 1.1

I'm not really into video games. If I do play games, it's usually small and fast games; games you can start up and play for 15 minutes without having to go through a story, or determine long-term strategies. For a while now, I've been playing Bejeweled 2, the extremely addictive jewel popping game from PopCap Games. I think this market has a huge potential. This kind of games have low system requirements, a fairly low price, a small download size, simple rules that are easy to learn, etc... They are not for hardcore gamers, but for everyone else.

Today, I've downloaded the trial version of PopCap's latest game: Talismania. The demo version lets you play for 60 minutes, and I must admit: those 60 minutes flew by. They managed to produce another awesome game, with nice graphics, great music and simple but addictive gameplay. I suggest you download the trial version (a small 12.6 MB download) and try it out.

PS: I'm not sponsored by PopCap, or in anyway affiliated. I'm just a fan.

Rory Blyth posts his opinion on open-source projects. Like usual, he likes to exaggerate a bit, but he does make a good point: "To get things done, you need to be able to tell Leia to shut up."

Bart Desmet has posted a cool article: Getting started with SQL Server 2005 Everywhere Edition. I think this is a cool technology, that can be used a lot easier than SQL Server Express. It's smaller, needs less memory, doesn't have to be installed as a service, and can run in-process. A cool usage for this would be to use SQL/e as a file format for your application. If you're creating a word processor, or any document-oriented application, you could use SQL/e instead of creating a custom file format.