Month: April 2016

  • C#: Using the Background Worker to thread your application processing.

    In this article I go over using the background worker control in C# .NET Framework (Visual Studio 2015). This control allows you to easily do processing intensive tasks without locking up your interface thread. I use this a lot in winforms applications where I expect code to take any amount of time that the user…

  • Android: Working with Preferences and Settings

    In this article I go over using the built-in Android settings and preference system. I have a settings class as well as an activity that manages user input. A spinner is assigned the task of letting the user turn on or off a vibration feature. When the application is started again, the setting is accessed…

  • Javascript & HTML: Async Communication Prototype

    In this article I go over an asynchronous communication prototype I had made in straight Javascript that you use to POST to a server script and pass along the response to a Javascript function specified by the initial call to the prototype. The main benefit here is that you don’t need a full page refresh,…

  • Android: Basic game loop with scaled graphics.

    In this article I go over implementing a simple game loop with a custom view. The standard draw method is used with some timing checks so that we can get an approximately consistent refresh rate. This is a somewhat simple way to get started without having to use something OpenGL. The full source code is…

  • Android: Get the size of a custom view before display.

    When developing applications or simple games for Android where you are drawing or writing to a view, an issue arises upon startup of the view. In my case I had a game where I wanted to calculate screen tile size before the game view starts, but with most tutorials I had seen everything happened after…