I'm playing around a little bit with a hooked DirectX 9 application. As you may know, the D3DX framework has been deprecated in Windows 8. Microsoft advises us to "investigate alternative solutions to working with the Direct3D API". What are alternative solutions to using the handy D3DXCreateFont in Windows 8? I am working with DirectX version 9. If I am still able to reference the D3DX framework somehow in Windows 8, this is my preferred solution.
Use D3DX.
In this particular case, because you are hooking an application already using DirectX 9, using the libraries and resources provided by that version of the API is your best solution. When working with D3D9, using D3DX for the utility functions is perfectly acceptable and recommended practice.
The recommendations apply to software designed for Windows 8. While your software may be intended to work on that platform, hooking into applications that was not imposes significant restrictions. You have to work with what's already in use, and in this case, D3DX is going to be far more compatible than trying to rope in new libraries. In fact, given how many D3D9 and earlier apps use D3DX, there's a good chance it's already in use, and you may be able to just reuse that.
Note that this does not mean the D3DX DLL(s) you need are present; depending on the application, there may only be a single version present, so you may need to provide the DLL(s) or installer.
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I have a friend who is was a serious Linux developer but now he's working with C# on Windows and is really loving it. I'm attracted to C# because, like Java, I should be able to compile on one system and run anywhere.
If you are developing on Windows with C#, you're using dot-Net. On Linux and MacOS, you're using Mono.
Other people have posted that Mono is pretty good, no longer a science project, and that most of the core Microsoft functionality is present. But that's not really getting at the questions that I have. I'm wondering:
How does performance of Mono on Linux/MacOS rate against Java? If I want to run fast on all three platforms with the same object code, what's my best choice?
Is it easy/possible/reasonable to use Mono with makefiles and do my development with emacs?
Is there support for code factoring in MacOS and Linux, or am I better off just biting the bullet and doing all of my development in Windows?
How well does Mono work with Subversion and the rest of the open source development stack? How about autoconf? Or is this a completely different way of doing things?
Thanks
I have been using Mono on Linux for about three years and lately have been using it on OS X. Some of the Linux stuff was pretty extensive but the OS X stuff has just been some simple ASP.NET MVC2 apps so far.
1) Performance of Mono has never been an issue for me. That is not to say that performance has not been important, it is just that the performance of Mono itself has never been an issue. A lot of what I have done is web based so I/O and database memory use have hit me before Mono has.
Historically, the biggest deficiency with Mono has been the Garbage Collector (GC). I would say that Java is better tuned in this regard. The most recent versions of Mono have made huge strides in this area but I do not have any hard numbers for you in terms of comparisons.
I am sure Mono is faster sometimes and Java sometimes but I would say that Java is faster overall.
2) You can certainly do Mono development with makefiles. Certainly the Mono team itself does. Also you can certainly use Emacs and there is a C# mode for it.
I tend to use MonoDevelop and xbuild (Mono version of msbuild) myself and do not have any experience doing C# work in Emacs. MonoDevelop is great because it is exactly the same on all platforms. Also, although I rarely use it anymore, it is nice that the project format is the same as Visual Studio and SharpDevelop.
3) MonoDevelop has pretty decent code factoring support. It is the same on Windows, Linux, and Mac. You do not need to use Windows for development (though you certainly can) but I believe you will be happier using an IDE like MonoDevelop. Even things like Intellisense become hard to live without once you are used to them. But integrated debugging, being able to drill-down into the framework, database integration, unit testing, SCM integration, and other nice tooling support all in one place is just the way to go (for me at least).
4) Mono itself does not care about version control of course. Your source files are just text and you could use anything to manage them.
That said, MonoDevelop has fantastic Subversion support built right into the IDE. I have used it extensively and it is one of the reasons I have trouble moving off MonoDevelop even on Windows. The latest version of MonoDevelop (2.6 beta) includes Git support as well.
You did not mention unit testing but MonoDevelop also has NUnit support built into the IDE. I use that on every project as well and it works excellently. The version in MonoDevelop is 2.4.8 (if memory serves) so it is not quite current but it works great.
In a nutshell, Mono works really well with Open Source tooling in general. It has always played really well for me.
Autoconf is of course used by the Mono project itself but, as a Mono developer, I have never seen a need for it. I strive to only use managed code in my projects. As such, all I need on the target platform is Mono (or .NET). Not having to worry about all that stuff is one of the primary benefits of a managed environment like Mono or Java. The runtime itself (the CLR) ensures that my app has everything it needs to function properly.
I know that MonoDevelop will build autoconf/autorun files for C/C++ projects (non-Mono) but I have not done much with it myself.
As to a previous comment, the Mono JIT is obviously tuned to the target platform. That is where platform specific performance tuning happens.
Just as a comment, I find that Mono is best viewed as a development environment in it's own right rather than a compatibility layer for Microsoft stuff. The Mono team has extended .NET in many interesting ways. Anything you develop for Mono will run on .NET but there are some .NET features not available for Mono. For example, Mono does not support Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). You have to use Windows Forms or GTK# for cross-platform GUI work. You can also use something like Cocoa# or MonoMac on the Mac, MonoTouch on iPhone, or MonoDroid for Android. You can use Moonlight instead of Silverlight as well although I have not played with it much.
One more thing since you asked about Java. I have found a few times that the Java world had libraries that I could not find equivalents for in the .NET world. In these cases, I have had amazing luck using IKVM.NET to integrate this into my Mono apps. IKVM.NET also works on .NET but Mono and IKVM.NET are very cozy and even share some code.
So there you go, one real answer for you at least.
I need to develop a software which works for both windows and Mac OS.
The requirement are follows:
User can view flash file, make the selection and software print out the user selected flash file list.
I have experience in .net and windows platform but no experience in Mac OS. What is best development language and tool for my current situation.
I may be a bit biased on this, but you should use Qt because it will make your code portable on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and even some mobile platforms. I don't really understand your requirement but Qt is pretty much the all-round cross-platform solution. It's C++ based, but easy as such (no memory management hassle, Qt takes care of it all).
On one hand you could use Java, it's fully compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux, also the language is similar to C# so you could adapt without too much trouble, if you used .net with C#.
On the other hand you could use your knowledge in .net and use Mono. It's an open source library for running .net code in other platforms, It's not equal to .net (doesn't include all the libraries) but could solve your problem.
Hope my answer helps you.
Xojo is pretty easy to use and lets you make native Windows and Mac apps from a single source project so you might want to take a look at it.
Thanks to the gurus at StackOverflow. You guys are awesome. I posted on question on detecting idle time on a Compact framework application and got answers very quickly. When I tried the suggested solution on my Windows XP development box, I get this error
Unable to load DLL 'coredll.dll': The
specified module could not be found.
(On Windows XP)
After googling for sometime I understood that OpenNETCF libraries are trying to launch coredll.dll to detect the idle time but this dll is shiped with only Windows Mobile OS. As we are developing the application on a Windows XP PC and dont have access to Windows CE device now, we are struck with the problem.
Is there any way to get coredll.dll on Windows XP? Any other solution to this problem?
Updated: we are targeting the application for device running on Windows Mobile 6 Professional
I'm confused. The question was specifically about Compact Framework, which is for Windows CE. If you don't have your target hardware yet, then use an emulator.
In this specific case, the SDF is not P/Invoking to do this, it's using an IMessageFilter implementation. You could easily do the same for the desktop.
But that said, you simply can't develop a CF application targeting XP. What that means is that if you create your app using the full framework, targeting the desktop, and expect it to just run when you get your CE device, you're in for a big surprise. If targeting both OSes is a design goal, then there's a lot of work to be done, and most UI stuff is not transferrable (I'd actually recommend using different UI assemblies for the two targets and common business logic).
EDIT1
I guess to more fully answer the question of "can I get coredll.dll for my desktop?" the answer is a resounding "no". There are a multitude of reasons this wouldn't work (it's in ROM, it's hardware dependent, it's not actually a file, but fixed up to execute in place, it's compiled for a different OS, it may be compiled for a totally different processor, etc).
You have a couple options. You could try to create a desktop version of coredll.dll that exported all of the functions you want and proxies them to the kernel32, user32, etc DLLs. That's a boatload of work (been there, tried that).
You could try to write code that will work for both platforms. Doable, but also quite challenging.
The short of it is, unless you absolutely must target both, you don't want to try to. Get an emulator, virtual PC or some sort of eval system, and target that.
You can't run OpenNetCF in a Windows PC. You need to use a Windows CE emulator. This comes with the Windows CE SDK.
Write code that works for both platforms.
In our solution anything that is going to touch the platform is abstracted out to different objects. Therefore we have a IPlatformServices object (that returns stuff like IPowerManagement, IPrinter etc) we have two different implementations a PCPlatformServices and a CEPlatformServices and the one returned is based on the Environment.PlatformID value. In your scenario you want 2 different IdleDetector objects one for CE and one for Desktop. Aye its a bit of a pain to identify and abstract all this but you will need to do this is you want compatability between the two different platforms.
Our "PCPlatformServices" is mainly mocks in our case as we only want desktop compatibility to test things more quickly that don't interact with the hardware (like app code / business logic)
I'm starting to learn Objective-C and I don't have a Mac (and I don't have plans to get one), but as I see that Cocoa is a very good framework to develop in Objective-C, I want to know: Is it possible to develop using Cocoa in Windows and Linux?
Thanks.
I think that your best bet, if you want to use Cocoa, is to get a Mac. You really won't regret it. GNUstep is a neat solution, but it is impractical to distribute applications built using GNUstep, because (as far as I know), clients must have the runtime installed for it to work.
Cocotron is an amazing project as well, and in the future, it may be useful for you if you want simple apps to run on both Mac OS and Windows. But you would still need a Mac to use it.
If you are interested in using a language like Objective-C with a framework like Cocoa, but don't want to get a Mac, why don't you try web application development with Cappuccino and Objective-J?. Objective-J is an implementation of an Objcective-C-like language in JavaScript, and Cappuccino is a really amazing imitation of the Cocoa framework in Objective-J.
Some examples of what can be created using that framework are 280 Slides and the new, stunningly beautiful EnStore. That's not a perfect solution, and unless you are content to just do web applications, you should buy a Mac.
Take a look at Cocotron
The purpose of the project is to provide an easy to use cross-platform solution for Objective-C development. In particular, source code level compatibility with recent versions of Apple's frameworks (OS X 10.4 and 10.5).
The general goal is to provide complete support on any viable platform, the project is intended to be as portable as possible. However, most of the work at this time is focused on providing support for Microsoft Windows. In particular the NT based versions, 2000 up to Vista.
You can also run Snow leopard Server inside a virtual machine, like VMWare Fusion.
Apple changed it licence in 2008 to allow that, but only with server editions. I have personally used it with some success to deploy iphone applications (Although it was admitably a bit slow).
You will need decent hardware and preferably a dedicated hard-disk drive to be able to use it properly.
And considering the cost of vmware and osx server you might be better off buying a used mac.
I was currently developing a desktop application in C# using mono and testing in SuSE and Windows. The concept doesn't matter much, but it is a "web lint" program that will scan a web site and return possible issues with security and/or cross browser compatibility. However, I want to be able to offer binaries for multiple platforms. Should I stay with Mono, or is there another platform that would give me a better availablility of platforms, such as on Macs, Windows, Linux, and others (possibly mobile platforms), and make it easier to port?
Well, your best bet always is to use a language that actually exists on all the platforms. That usually means Java, I think, though even perl has flavours for mobile platforms (depending on the mobile platform in question).
I do most of my cross-platform work in C and perl, but there are some headaches with C (lots of #ifdef's), and perl may not be on a mobile platform you care about (yet). You'll have to evaluate the languages/compilers/interpreters that are common to all the platforms you want to target and then choose from that list. Without knowing the full list of such platforms, we'll have a hard time telling you what to use, though Java has enough buzz-wordness to likely be a strong candidate.
Iff you know C++, Qt will cover many platforms.
C# and Mono is probably cross-platform enough for most desktop environments. The trick will be the "mobile platform" requirement.
Mobile operating systems are wildly diverse and there's not a lot you can do to generalize. Some have Java, like the Blackberry. C# may get you onto Windows Mobile-based platforms. iPhones do their own thing. You pretty much have to pick a platform and target that. That may end up informing your desktop platform choice.
Just stick to the Mono, make sure that you have Gendarme code inspector (FxCop for Mono) checking your code for portability issues, and you should be fine.
Java will run on Windows, Linux and Macs. Should be easy to transition from C# - use Apache HTTPClient for grabbing the web content you are scanning, and the scanning code should be more or less the same. However the downside is requiring the user to have the Java runtime installed.
Python is another option - you can build stand-alone executables for Windows, and it comes with most Linux distributions by default, and also Mac OS X (citation needed ;) ). This is a lot less hassle for Windows users (language is compiled into the executable, no other downloads required).
If mono runs on Mac OS X then surely that is a good platform as well?
It really depends what you want to do. For web development, if HTML/JavaScript is enough then stick with it. If you need more advanced stuff I would use ASP.NET with Mono (what you probably did) since you already know that. (You can use Visual Studio here.)
Another option might be (since you are a C# developer) to use Silverlight. That gives you Windows and Mac platforms covered and hopefully Moonlight will cover Linxu platform later. (You can use Visual Studio and Expression Blend here.)
If you need desktop application then Java is probably the easiest since you already know C#. But if you know C/C++ try to take a look at wxWidgets for example.
Why limit yourself to the traditional C#/Java? Have a look at Adobe AIR and Microsoft SilverLight