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I am starting to make my own apps and publishing them. The problem I face is that my apps are mainly for my purposes. What are some problems that you face while in windows? I need some desktop application ideas that are simple but helpful.
Rather than giving you a fish, I will humbly try and teach you how to fish:
Take a blank sheet of paper and write out as clearly as you can the problem that you want to tackle. Clarity is key because clarity of purpose gets your mind focused on what you are really trying to accomplish.
Think of at least 20 ideas and write them down on that once blank paper. Let your mind really flow and give up worrying about whether your ideas are practical or what other people will think about them.
Read over your list and determine which ones actually are good ideas. You might want to put the list away for a while and then take it out the next day to see if you still think those ideas pass whatever test you have for your ideas.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Note that I don't necessarily know that I have a problem until you show me that I have a problem, and then show me how to fix it. Personally I think computers are still too hard to use, and I'm a programmer. Because my work life is so complex I like software and gadgets that are simple and elegant. MP3 players existed long before the iPod came out, but the iPod was able to get the mix right.
http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Come-Up-with-Good-Ideas
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This question is actually a theoretical one, not about specific coding, but of the approach.
In my video game, there are a lot of phrases that protagonist is supposed to say. Now, I want to add a voiceover, so that someone will read those phrases aloud, so I can add them as sounds, not just plain text.
There are many different phrases.
So, the main question is, what's better, to have each phrase as separate sound file, or to have those phrases divided by sections (like game areas, or game actions or whatever), where each large file will contain a number of phrases. Then, in code, I'll order to play the large file not completely, but from specific time, to specific time (is it possible in WPF?).
What is important:
Time - which approach is easier to do?
Resources - which approach is easier for computer and\or visual studio compiler?
Copyright - I want to limit the possibility of end users stealing sound files.
I personally think that having a thousand of files is crazy, so it's better to use larger files that contain smaller ones. However, my friend highly recommended against it, claiming that playing large files from the middle is harder for computer and will cause problems, maybe slow down the game.
What option will you recommend? Or maybe there is another approach I didn't think of?
Thank you in advance,
Evgenie
I would imagine that using seperate sound files would be easier. Then within c#, add them all to a list.
From that I think it should just be possible to call the index of each sound file, which would be easy if you keep them organised, and labeled well.
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I'm looking to sell my program I've been working on via year long subscriptions. How do you suggest I do this? Obviously checking DateTime.Now won't work since a user could change his computer time. I thought about having an encrypted number in my program files that counts down from 360 to 0, but if a user simply re-pasted their program files every so often, the timer would never run down.
What do you guys think I should do? I have access to a website and server, I just don't know much about web development besides basic HTML. Would having the program check with a web service to see if the key has expired be the best way? The only thing is that if a user didn't have internet, that would have problems.
Let me know what you guys think :D
Thanks
Every protection can be cracked some more easily that others. Coincidently, those that harder to crack are also most inconvenient for end users and sometimes too expensive. For example you can sell hardware dongle with your subscription.
What many companies settle for is providing a year of "free" updates. Your program evolves as you add new features but these are not available for those whose subscription time has ended. They will be able to use older versions eternally though.
Usually this is a good enough incentive to purchase. But have no doubt, if you program ever becomes even relatively widespread, it WILL BE cracked. That's the reality.
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I asked about this Q format on meta, and the they said that worded correctly, this should be appropriate. This being said, sorry if I still butchered the wording and just in case I'd like to get this across (as was recommended): I'm not looking for opinions on certain things or how they work, rather just the ways it's possible. I don't mean to sound ignorant and I'm truly sorry if I do, it was just suggested to me to say on Meta.
Now for the Q; What just general language at all would be capable of gathering information from public online websites, then putting it in the program where it could be further processed as just any old variable? I'm new to coding and wanted to do this as a little 'introductory' program, to teach myself some new stuff. Problem being, with my idea, I don't even know where to start. Again, I'm not asking for specific ways to do this, I was just curious what languages are capable of doing this at all? I'd prefer to do it in a Visual Studio's language (no preference of which ones), if that's possible.
In short: Are either Visual C#/C++ capable of gathering information online to be further handled within the program? If not, what languages are?
I agree with the comment that this is a complicated first programming task. However, you'll undoubtedly learn something trying it.
If you already had some experience programming in Python, I'd suggest you took a look at http://scrapy.org/doc/ which is a framework (that is, a bunch of classes and other useful tools) which let you write programs to extract information from web pages. Scrapy does let you concentrate on programming by taking care of some of the nasty details involved in parsing web pages.
Another option is to use a javascript framework, maybe something like node.js.
I've done a fair amount of web scraping, and I usually end up using a combination of utilities which clean up web pages and a variety of XSLT processors. I personally find that combination of technology to be easier to deal with; I don't try to use C-family languages until I've basically wrestled the data into shape. But everyone has their own style.
Good luck!
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What I want to be able to accomplish is to silently uninstall any installed anti-virus software (I know it sounds like I will be making a virus but I'm not).
according to Microsoft guidelines every program that properly installs itself makes a registry entry in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall. Usually, the key for the program will be its GUID, or else the name of the program. Within that key will be an entry called UninstallString so I just have to run that string in cmd I guess.
But I have never worked on anything like this before, since I am brainstorming if I will even attempt to do it find out how more experienced developers might approach it.
This is just not going to work out.
Regardless of how pure your motives may be (and I'll admit, I'm still rather suspect, despite your assurances), this is exactly the same thing that other people with impure motives would want to do.
Therefore, any antivirus vendor worth their salt is actively working to prevent this from being possible. In addition, as Matthew points out, Microsoft is working against you, too. In order to make this work, you'll have to figure out a way to skirt around the entire Windows security model.
I suppose you could enter an arms race against them, but they probably have a lot more resources to devote to the problem than you do and stand to gain a whole lot more from solving it. Moreover, the user is the one who stands to lose the most here. Not only is it extremely user-hostile to uninstall programs without their consent, if software vendors are spending their time locked in an arms race, they're not using that time, energy, and effort to improve their software in a meaningful way.
I strongly recommend abandoning the brainstorm before you've wasted too much time. Surely there's a better way to solve whatever task you're working on.
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A couple of months ago I've coded a tiny tool that we needed at work for a specific task, and I've decided to share it on CodePlex. It's written in C# and honestly it's not big deal but since it's the first project I've ever built from scratch in that language and with the goal of opening it from the very beginning, one ends getting sort of emotionally attached to it, I mean you'd wish that the people will actually participate, be it criticism, bug reporting, or what have you.
So my question is, what can I do to actually encourage participation, stimulate curiosity or just recieve more feedback about it?
By the way this is the project I'm talking about: http://www.codeplex.com/winxmlcook/
You should:
Promote it where you think it would be relevant (forums,mailing lists etc.). Try not to spam though - it will create a backlash.
continue to provide updates as to create the appearance of an active project until more people pick it up.
Find project leaders, they are the sort of contributors that encourage others to contribute as well.
Blog about it and link to relevant blogs (creating ping-backs). Also leave comments at relevant blog posts.
Basically, your generic Internet marketing tactics ;)
You first have to acquire users by marketing the tool. Once you have users, that naturally means you'll start getting feedback.
One thing I noticed is your project description doesn't sell the project well. For example, type "winxmlcook" into Google, what gets shown is your project description but it's not likely to get someone to click on it.
I know I sound like a broken record constantly posting this book, but just about everything you could ever need to know about running an open source project is here. In particular, pay attention to these two chapters:
Getting Started
Managing Volunteers