Tim Preuster

I just finished the work on WWW.AlternativeForAsia.com . Which is a beneficial music single by Austrian Alternative Bands for Tsunami victims. The site has a short preview of the song, TV spots and tomorrow also the video. So have a look, if you like Rock/Alternative music and if you are from Austria (if you really want it from outside of Austria I can perhaps relay orders) then buy the CD if you like it to support the project by the Red Cross.

A .NET wrapper for the great Newton Game Dynamics Engine was released yesterday, so if you have searched for a physics engine to work with Managed DirectX give it a try. That is what I am doing right now :-)

There are many examples for Newton out there and also the SDK includes some examples in C++, so it shouldn't be a Problem to get into that stuff.

SDK Download and Links to other examples
Great examples but in Delphi but well documented

Free Fluid Simulation example in Directx 9
Definetly worth a visit also there are other great advanced tech demos (Grass,Refraction, Fluid and PRT Demos with included source) and Games 

found via www.flipcode.org

..... then "The Z Buffer" Site is the way to go. The Site made by ZMan a.k.a Andy Dunn looks really promising, I already found some infos I did'nt know yet. So keep up the good work and I think the growing community (and myself) will really appreciate your work.

After my last post , which is now a long time ago, David Weller has picked up the topic about my open question  if VB.NET discriminates directly DirectX and Tom Miller posted also his thoughts about it. And he made it clear what also my originally thought was , it is just a simple Bug and will be fixed in a future release. I NEVER wanted to presume that this was intentionally against VB developers (because i am not one of the die hard vbies , i am just using vb due to my laziness on writing punctuations and Big/Small letters :-)), what made me post was more my curiosity that there are no tests or tools used to check the compatibility also against VB.NET.

As David Weller mentioned and also me in my last post, I think its completely the correct way to have managed examples only in one language. Because more examples are much better than having only a hand full of examples in different languages. (Perhaps then the COBOL.Net programmers are ranting that they want also some Managed examples ;-) ) So please keep up the good work on the examples , I appreciate each of them and I am really looking forward to see some more examples through the new short turn around schedule for DX SDK.

I don't think its necessary to know C++ to master DirectX , but it simply gives you a much broader base of tutorials and examples to use, lets hope it will change in the future that we see more complex tutorials also in Managed languages which is especially for tutorials from my opinion much easier to read. So I definitely would recommend learning C++ reading, if you want to dive into the DirectX world and don't know C++

But now back to the DrawText problem David Weller has posted a C# mini-dll workaround to use all the features of DrawText, so get it here if you are having difficulties with it. Also Knight Chat X has posted a alternative class for using DrawText here, unfortunately I wasn't able to test his code yet.

No, I am not talking about the point that there are no more VB.NET samples in the new 9.0c SDK. I even like the fact that they are now concentrating on one language to have more examples, so please keep up the good work and give us more manged DirectX stuff (I want to see more managed examples then C++ stuff).

I mean the following thing in the Font Class (Which is used also in GUI example) :

Public Function DrawText( _
    ByVal sprite As Sprite, _
    ByVal text As String, _
    ByVal rect As Rectangle, _
    ByVal format As DrawTextFormat, _
    ByVal color As Color _
) As Integer

Or

Public Function DrawText( _
    ByVal sprite As Sprite, _
    ByVal text As String, _
    ByRef rect As Rectangle, _
    ByVal format As DrawTextFormat, _
    ByVal color As Color _
) As Integer

Which differs only in the rect Value which is one time byval and one time byref so I am getting a "not most specific" error when I want to compile. I am still able to DrawText by another function call but then it is not possible to use the DrawTextFormat for formatting the text :-( .

So does anyone know a way to specify which way I want to call in VB.net or is it really a design flaw ?!?!

I am now officially back at home after 2 weeks holiday in the beautiful Unterach (Austria -> Alps). Just before that when I started my blog I was doing some project work in the UK on a POS System, which made it a bit complicated to dive completely in my new blog  ...

But now I am back  and I have the fortune to start a complete new software, and the ideas I have for it are currently faster coming out of me then I am with researching / planning / designing ...

... and I am finally in ... this is my first blog , and I think geekswithblogs.net is the perfect area for my blog because I dont want to be completely restricted to one area. So I hope someone out there is interested in what i write to the world and that not only my girlfriend or relatives read that (can I configure on .text to exclude this group of people from my stats that it is more objective ?! ;-)) .

A little bit about myself :

- I am from Vienna / Austria / Europe / Earth (so please excuse my English sometimes) and I am the owner of a Software + Graphic/Web Design Company (but don't worry I won't make a advertising site out of this/ the site is currently only in german so link comes when it is translated and updated) which is currently specialized on CMS and Websites, but we are doing also Custom Development and Training

- Main Work Related Interests : .NET (especially ASP.NET), Flash, Graphics + Design

- Other Interests I plan to blog about : Gadgets , Gaming, Sports, and other things that come into my mind ..

I also plan to write some articles  ...

Thanks to Jeff Julian for setting up my blog in the geekswithblogs.net world