MindBlaster Article Posted

mindblaster My latest Coding4Fun article on the creation of my game MindBlaster is now available!  This is a game I wrote using XNA Game Studio 3.1 that combines a Nintendo Wiimote and a Neurosky MindSet headset to create a game you play entirely with your head.  If you were at PDC09 and stopped by the Coding4Fun area you may have seen it, or, if you’ll be at MIX10, please stop by the Coding4Fun area and see this and 3 or 4 more even better projects by Coding4Fun authors.

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MIX10, Coding4Fun Show, and You!

c9logo I will be at MIX10 showing off MindBlaster once again.  More on that shortly…

But, more importantly, are you going to MIX10?  Do you have a fun or interesting project you’d like to talk about?  Let me know!  I’m looking for people to interview for the Coding4Fun Show.  I’m always interested in talking to people who want to chat about what they’re working on, even if it’s just a hobby or something that’s incomplete.  That’s what Coding4Fun is all about!  So please, if you’ll be at the MIX, have a few minutes to chat, and want to be the envy of your friends, contact me!

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Acer 1420P Leaky Handle Driver Fix

Download: SDTabletPCFix_1.0.0.0.zip

acer 1420p

I wasn’t lucky enough to receive the Acer 1420P laptop given out at PDC this year since I was “staff”, however I wound up picking one up on eBay for a very reasonable price. I received it last week, added an additional 2GB of RAM, used my Windows Home Server to save off the original hard drive image, and then repaved the machine, installing Windows 7 Ultimate x64, drivers, and applications from scratch. Earlier this week I noticed the machine was consuming over 3GB of memory with only 1 or 2 applications open. Looking at Task Manager, the RAM usage by process looked normal, which didn’t match the total memory usage. After reading the Performance tab a bit more, I saw that the operating system had over 5 million handles open!

Back on the Processes tab, I turned on the Handles column and saw that a process named SDTabletPC.exe was consuming 5 million handles, and it was growing by 10 handles per second. Check it out for yourself.

SDTabletPC.exe …

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Multi-touch Madness Slides and Code

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Thanks to everyone who attended my TVUG session last night!  I have uploaded the slides and code for this session which can be downloaded here.  Note that you’ll need Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 for most of the samples, and you will need to have the Surface Workstation SDK SP1 installed if you wish to run that sample.

Comments and questions are welcome, as always.  Thanks!

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Multi-touch Madness at Tech Valley .NET Users Group

image For my fellow Capital District folks, I’ll be giving a session to the Tech Valley .NET Users Group (TVUG) this Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 6:30pm all about everything you’ve ever wanted to know about multi-touch in Windows 7 and beyond!  Here are the details….

Multi-touch Madness!

Where: Versa Trans Solution, Latham, NY
When: Tuesday, January 12, 2010, 6:30-9PM
Who: Brian Peek, Microsoft MVP - C#

Overview: Multi-touch technology is popping up everywhere, most recently in Windows 7 and various .NET technologies.  Windows 7 has been designed from the ground-up with multi-touch in mind, and the newest versions of WPF and Silverlight are multi-touch capable as well.  In this session I will take you through the 4 biggest areas of Microsoft multi-touch technology: Windows 7, WPF4, Silverlight, and Surface.  You will learn how to make your applications multi-touch aware and capable using each of these platforms, and learn where multi-touch is heading in the …

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