There was a piece on Kotaku this weekend looking at the development at AI in games, It specifically set out to ask leading figures what they thought of the development of virtual “beings” in games, “Kotaku set out to ask experts in the fields of Hollywood movie magic, theme park creators, robotics experts and AI specialists [...]

A quick code snippet.  These two extension methods (C# 3.0+) enables you to return custom attributes from types, both on a specific type and any data type.  They both return null if the attribute is not present.   The first extension is useful for extending a type of your choice.  It’s especially useful when considering Enums [...]

I’ve previously provided a code snippet illustrating how to use WiX (the “new” Windows Installer framework) to install certificates onto the target machine. I’ve had some good feedback about the post, but also had a request for a working example (in order to illustrate how the code fragment is used in an Installer.wxs file). I’ve cooked up [...]

I Know It Sucks, But You Need Requirements To Work There are two parts of software development that really suck. Traditional requirements analysis and documentation. This isn’t some silly joke, both practices are terribly antiquated and essentially useless, not least in an agile (read: rapidly changing) project. However, one of the common misconceptions I often [...]

This is a round about response to both Leigh Alexander’s response to Heather Chaplin’s GDC rant session.  It’s worth noting that I wasn’t at GDC and that all my information is second hand, and as such, susceptible to Chinese whispers-style misinformation.  To quote Leigh’s post (as a good source of a direct quote) ‘She argued that [...]

A little bit of site administration… Anyone who writes on the internet will happily tell you that the best way to keep your readers happy is to carve out a niche and devote your time to well researched detailed content. I’ve always treated davidwhitney.co.uk as a traditional “home page”. It’s my blank canvas, and I intend to [...]

Fear Of Deployment When you start working on a new project there are four really important pieces of information you should be aware of regarding the deployment of your software Are you unafraid of deploying your code to production? Do you know how your code will react in your production environment with production configuration? Does your code react in [...]

Just a quick note here as I had to do a lot of digging to fix this issue. Issue: HTC Diamond (potentially other models) not waking up from “sleep mode” when you have an email send/receive schedule. Instead, when you wake the device up it establishes a connection immediately and performs the check. Problem: It appears [...]

I’ve just compiled what I hope is the final version of this application barring London growing extra underground lines. I’ve written a small Windows Mobile application for phones running WinMo 5.0+ with Compact Framework 2.0+.  It syndicates the Transport for London live data in similar way to the pre-existing iPhone and Android applications allowing you to [...]

A very quick late night post. I’m a big fan of HTC’s Touch Diamond once you remove all the cruft that the major phone networks like to cram onto their devices.  It’s a pocket sized, powerful smart phone.  I picked one up only a few months ago as a replacement for my HTC Touch, which was [...]