I’ve decided to setup a simple contest to give away a free copy of our book, Coding4Fun: 10 .NET Programming Projects for Wiimote, YouTube, World of Warcraft, and More.  Entering is simple.  Post a reply to this forum post located at:

https://brianpeek.com/forums/p/1012/3258.aspx

And to make it a bit more interesting, here’s a topic for your post:  How have you coded for fun?  Write up a couple sentences on any fun project you’ve tackled at some point in your spare time.  I won’t disqualify you if you don’t, but I’d love to hear about your projects, and I’m sure others would too.

Make sure you are registered on this site with a valid email address and are logged into your account so I have a way to get in touch with you if you are the winner.  No, this isn’t some elaborate scheme to harvest email addresses…

Entries must be received by Saturday, February 28th at 11:59pm EST.  One person will be randomly selected and contacted shortly thereafter …

This week, Dan Fernandez and I had the opportunity to be on the .NET Rocks! show with Richard and Carl.  We spent some time chatting about our Coding4Fun book (available at fine booksellers everywhere!) and several extremely interesting projects Richard and Carl have created in the past, including an anthromoporphic remote-controlled car, and a parrot who enjoys extremely right-wing politics.  I think you’ll just need to listen to the show to understand what those are about…

If you’ve followed any of my Virtual Earth 3D projects, you know that the managed API has been undocumented and unsupported for a while.  All the work that has been done so far has been possible due to a few VE3D team members posting information on their blogs and through reverse engineering using tools like Reflector.

Well, half of the problem has been solved:  The VE3D team has now released beta documentation for the VE3D GlobeControl !  As their blog post states, it’s still beta and not officially supported, but it’s definitely a great a start.

Now to see what assumptions I made in my projects that are incorrect…

I have just put up the latest version of WiimoteLib at CodePlex.  The changes for this release are:

v1.7.0.0

• Writing registers is now properly waiting for the Wiimote to reply before continuing...this removes all of the Thread.Sleep() calls and should *greatly* improve performance when setting LEDs and rumble (Serial Nightmare & wwibrew.org)
• Guitar Hero: World Tour Guitar and Drums now properly recognized and used (wiibrew.org, tested by Tyler Tolley and Mauro Milazzo)
• Guitar whammy bar is now a 5-bit value instead of 4 (wiibrew.org)
• Position of 4 IRs now properly reported in Basic reporting mode (Dan Carter)
• Found1/2 now properly reported in MSRS (reported by akka243)
• MSRS project updated to Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008

Please give this new version a try and let me know how it works for you, especially if you have one of the newly supported controllers.  And, as always, what features/bugs would you like to see added/fixed?  Please …

At the very last minute before Scott left for Africa, Dan Fernandez and I were able to do a quick episode of Hanselminutes to promote our book.  Have a listen to learn a bit more about our book, the projects it contains, how they were developed, and some issues we ran into when trying to use some technologies in a way they weren’t intended to be used.  Head over to the main site to stream the show in your browser or download in a variety of other formats.