Programming

Just been updating the structure of the site to reflect our recent activity, which is pretty much mostly Silverlight at the moment. Check out the dedicated Silverlight Development page for more details!

We are pleased to announce the release of Quadratic Solver 1.0. You can see more information on the product page.

Quadratic solver plots, and displays the solution to the quadratic polynomial equation. It can handle real and complex types of solution, and so displays the full complex number solution rather than just display an error message saying the solution is complex!

You can also see a HD video demo of Quadratic Solver on our YouTube page.

Let us know what you think!

See link at the bottom of the post for information on how to download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, or just go straight to the Microsoft Visual Studio site here.

The next major release of Microsoft’s Visual Studio development environment is apparently going to be developed with the front end GUI written in WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). Much of Visual Studio will still probably be written in C++, there will be significant portions of it developed with C# and WPF. WPF as many of you may know is the new Windows Forms API that is set to supersede the current version that has been around since the .NET 1.0 framework was released. Although there are other existing fully fledged applications developed in WPF, one of which is Microsoft’s Expression Blend 2, Visual Studio 2010 is certainly going to be the largest application that makes use of the new WPF technology. WPF has attracted a lot of attention over the last year or so as it is based on a completely different structure to the more traditional Windows forms. Here is a run down of just a few of the features available to WPF developers:

• 2D and 3D support baked directly into WPF.
• New and more flexible structure for handling events (via ‘Routed Events’).
• All Form elements are vector based and so resize to the parent container without loss of quality.
• Many new layout controls for a much more flexible UI. Things like fluid layouts (similar to web applications) can be developed very easily).
• Separation of the UI design from the code behind. The UI is designed using a new language called XAML (pronounced ‘zammel’).

This means that you will have some cool IDE tools available in Visual Studio 2010 such as being able to resize the code window (zooming in and out) rather than having to select a specific pixel size for your fonts. continue

Microsoft Excel is such a flexible and powerful tool that you can use in all manner of situations. Below, is a screen shot of an Excel spreadsheet application we have developed that encapsulates the quadratic equation. It plots the quadratic graph over a specified range, and displays the chart data. The coefficient input for the quadratic is entered by the user and also displayed. Then, immediately after the user has entered the coefficient data, the graph updates and the solutions for the quadratic equation are calculated and shown in spreadsheet cells B6, and C6. There is also a button control on the spreadsheet to take you to the developers home page which, in this case, is us, at gwycon.com!

Quadratic equation spreadsheet. Layout of controls, data, and chart.

As mentioned above, whenever the spreadsheet updates automatically the quadratic equation solutions are calculated immediately and displayed to the user. This happens by means of a custom programmed spreadsheet function to calculate the solutions to a quadratic equation. If the solutions turn out to be complex, the function returns the string “Err!”. continue

Ok, so any self respecting site developing applications for the desktop and the web needs to be able to display code clearly. This means formatting it so it is laid out in a similar style to the code editor it was created in. So, mono-spaced font type and code highlighting is essential to making your code readable to others. Of course this doesn’t simply mean covering HTML and CSS languages to code highlight, and be assured that will be posting code snippets in a whole range of programming and scripting languages!

With this in mind we have implemented a system to highlight code written in many different programming languages. See below for a couple of quick examples:

Here is some formatted C# code:

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using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Data;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Forms;
 
namespace WindowsFormsApplication22
{
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }
 
        private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            MessageBox.Show("Hello World!");
        }
    }
}

Below is some more formatted code. This time XAML (XAML, or Extensible Application Markup Language, is the new mark-up language used in Microsoft’s WPF language).

This time no line numbers this time, so this gives us flexible options for displaying formatted code:

<window x:Class="WpfApplication6.Window1"
  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
  xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
  Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300">
  <grid>
    <textblock Text="Hello" Height="21" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"
     Margin="10,10,0,0" Name="textBlock1" VerticalAlignment="Stretch"
     Width="120" Background="Coral" TextAlignment="Center" />
  </grid>
</window>

continue

Polynomial Explorer is an application developed in C# using Visual Studio 2008. It was written to graph and display a polynomial equation with terms included up to the 6th degree (x⁶). Any combination of terms can be displayed and each term is controlled by a slider to alter a terms coefficient value. The user interface has been designed so that the equation is displayed clearly and the terms can be altered in an intuitive method via the slider controls. continue

Microsoft Excel is a very versatile tool and can be used for many different purposes. The example we have here is a volume calculator for some simple geometric shapes. The user can enter values for the parameters (such as side length, or radius), and the corresponding volume is updated automatically.

Click to enlarge

However, rather than just display the parameters and calculated volume, it is often more user friendly to format the spreadsheet area with diagrams, and the odd splash of colour here and there!

Also, this example does not make use of any macros, but could be easily extended to do so. The volume equation for each shape is entered directly into worksheet cells but could be stored in macro code instead in the form of a custom worksheet function. This function could then be called as necessary, just like a standard worksheet function.

Here is an implementation of a trigonometric function, plotted as a 2D graph. Interactive controls are available to alter the graph dynamically. The sine wave plotted incorporates parameters commonly used in physics. You can directly control the amplitude (A), phase (phi), and the angular frequency (k).

Try it now! Click on the slider bars in the Flash example above to change the sine waves properties.

There are also some basic graph options that can be set via check boxes, these can be toggled on/off. Finally, there is a useful function that is a good thing to have in any application, and that is a reset button. This simply resets the graph back to the state when first loaded. This example is coded using ActionScript 2.0.

Extending this example to graph any function is fairly straight forward and could handle some quite complex equations with multiple parameters. The range of each axis would have to be carefully rendered though to make sure the graph ‘zoom’ was correctly set, otherwise the graph may not display correctly.