Building WPF and Silverlight applications can be challenging, especially for those new to
the technology. Building clean, maintainable, extensible, testable, loosely coupled ones—
with no idea where to start—is close to impossible. In late 2007, I was privileged to get a
call from Glenn Block at Microsoft asking if I was...
Open Source GIS (Geographic Information Systems) is a growing area with
the explosion of Google Maps-based websites and spatially-aware devices and
applications. The GIS market is growing rapidly, and as a Python developer you
can't afford to be left behind. In today's location-aware world, all commercial Python
developers can...
The need for this project was born of frustration while working towards my
PhD. I was investigating optimization algorithms and was implementing
a large number of them for a software platform called the Optimization
Algorithm Toolkit (OAT)1. Each algorithm required considerable effort
to locate the relevant source material (from...
Every high-quality animated production begins with an idea and ends with a series of rendered frames. Getting
from the idea, to the finished product, involves many different stages that are often handled by various specialists
throughout a studio.
Each step along the way contributes to the final image in some way. The concept...
Whether it's tapping, flicking, pinching, or stretching, the vocabulary and gestures of user interfaces have changed a lot in the past year. Multitouch surfaces are now common across almost all platforms and device types. The new Windows Touch API, along with innovations from the Surface project, make it easier than ever to build...
You have just bought your new Windows Phone 7 device and would like to start developing applications. You need to know the device’s hardware characteristics such as screen resolution and memory capability—but also which sensors and services it provides. Finally, you need to understand what the Windows Phone 7 operating system...
Penetration testing is often considered an art as much as it is a science, but even an
artist needs the right brushes to do the job well. Many commercial and open source
tools exist for performing penetration testing, but it’s often hard to ensure that you
know what tools are available and which ones to use for a certain task....
The Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) system is the foundation of the data
warehouse. A properly designed ETL system extracts data from the source
systems, enforces data quality and consistency standards, conforms data
so that separate sources can be used together, and finally delivers data
in a presentation-ready format so that...
Animation as both an art form and popular entertainment has existed for
almost a century now. The early attempts were received enthusiastically
more for their novelty than for the quality of their craft. That even holds
true today: animated movies often make it through the studio process not
because of their true entertainment value,...
This book is broken into three parts. The first introduces the three projects that will be
used throughout this book, the second introduces some of the most common themes
in creating interaction in designs and applications, and the third introduces some of
the more advanced topics that you may want to explore further. Also...
JavaFX 2.0 is Java’s next generation graphical user interface (GUI) toolkit for developers to rapidly build
rich cross-platform applications. Built from the ground up, JavaFX takes advantage of modern GPUs
through hardware-accelerated graphics while providing well-designed programming interfaces enabling
developers to...
When I was about nine years old, I had an Acorn Electron, a home computer developed
by Acorn Machines and one of the major precursors to modern home computing. It
was tiny by today’s standards, having just 32K of RAM, a 2MHz CPU, and with the
staggering ability to store a massive 360 Kb on the 3 inch Amstrad disks I was using...
