Charles Petzold
Charles Petzold
Charles Petzold shows you how to create XAudio2 Audio Processing Objects (APOs) to perform customized processing of audio streams.
June
2013
Charles Petzold
Charles Petzold explains how you can alter the harmonic composition of sound through the use of filters and he shows how to accomplish this using XAudio2 in Windows 8.
May
2013
Charles Petzold
Windows 8 makes it easy to write programs that can access individual music files. Using DirectX components is more difficult, but adds versatility, as Charles Petzold describes.
April
2013
Charles Petzold
Windows 8 combines a high-performance audio API with touch screens on hand-held tablets. Join with Charles Petzold as he explores the potential this combination offers for creating musical instruments.
February
2013
Charles Petzold
Charles Petzold finds that XAudio2 offers sophisticated audio processing for Windows Store applications.
January
2013
Charles Petzold
Getting a map on the Windows Phone screen is easy, but rotating it so that north on the map is actually pointing north is another matter entirely. Charles Petzold describes how he used the Bing Maps SOAP Service to get the results he wanted.
The Motion sensor in Windows Phone 7.5 consolidates information from the phone’s compass and accelerometer to create a rotation matrix that describes the orientation of the phone in 3D space. Recently I began pondering how the phone’s orientation could be used in combination with Bing Maps. I anticipated a quickie mashup but the job turned out to be rather more complex.
November
2012
Charles Petzold
Charles Petzold concludes his four-part exploration of motion sensors in the Windows Phone platform, building an application that lets users interact with planets and constellations in the night sky.
October
2012
Charles Petzold
Charles lays the conceptual, mathematical and programmatic groundwork for a program that lets you point a Windows phone at a spot in the night sky and show the planets and constellations.
September
2012
Charles Petzold
Although we no longer believe that celestial spheres surround the Earth, that’s still a handy concept for programs that let you use a smartphone to view a virtual world. Such a program needs to determine its orientation in 3D space, and Charles Petzold explains how to accomplish this using the horizontal coordinate system.
August
2012
Charles Petzold
When a Windows Phone program knows the orientation of the phone in 3D space, the phone can provide a portal into a 3D world. The new Motion class makes it possible, as Charles Petzold explains.
July
2012
Charles Petzold
Smartphones get lots of input from the world through their sensors, but you can get even more by combining those sensors, as Charles Petzold shows with an example that combines the compass and accelerometer.
June
2012
Charles Petzold
What could be more fun than combining audio streaming with multi-touch and turning your phone into an electronic music instrument? Charles Petzold shows you how.
April
2012
Charles Petzold
Charles Petzold looks into streaming audio on Windows Phone. This occurs through a class derived from MediaStreamSource, which feeds the audio data to the OS's audio player on demand. Petzold shows how to stream audio in the background on Windows Phone OS 7.5.
March
2012
Charles Petzold
Windows Phone 7.5 introduces the concept of a background agent, which you can use for playing either music files or streaming audio while your program is suspended. Charles Petzold shows you how to play audio files in the background.
February
2012
Charles Petzold
Before he tackles the new background audio capability in Windows Phone OS 7.1, Charles Petzold explores the ins and outs of the more standard way to play songs.
January
2012
Charles Petzold
While the initial release of Windows Phone included only one camera API, that deficiency has been corrected with two new sets of APIs that Charles uses to have some fun with video.
December
2011
Charles Petzold
Charles Petzold finishes his Windows Phone 7 e-book reader with a Web service that gets the catalog file from Project Gutenberg, and a Pivot control to display a search screen and a list of downloaded books.
November
2011
Charles Petzold
Charles turns to the horror genre in celebration of Halloween as he improves his e-book reader with the addition of “a whole bunch of dialog boxes” to aid in navigation and enhance user interaction.
October
2011
Charles Petzold
Text selection can be awkward on a touch interface, but it offers too many benefits to ignore. Charles Petzold shows you how to implement this feature in the context of an e-book reader, using concepts that can be applied to any Windows Phone program that displays text to the screen and allows the reader to interact with that text.
September
2011
Charles Petzold
Silverlight is a graphical environments that doesn’t provide font metrics to application program developers, so Charles Petzold shows you a workaround to help you lay out text and pages.
August
2011
Charles Petzold
For the most fluid page transitions in an e-book, the user interface needs to support three distinct pages—the current page, the next page, and the previous page. Charles Petzold describes a flexible way to implement this using three different page transitions.
July
2011
Charles Petzold
E-book readers are simple, right? Just render some text and a way you go. Well, maybe it's not that simple after all. We start building an e-book reader for Windows Phone 7 by investigating the mechanism behind paginating the text.
June
2011
Charles Petzold
Get a handle on the nuts and bolts of adding printing capabilities to your Silverlight apps as Charles walks through programs to print an ellipse, an image and a calendar.
May
2011
Charles Petzold
The pattern created by the interaction of two sine waves is a Lissajous curve – you've probably seen one on an oscilloscope. We'll show you how to make one in Silverlight for the Web or Windows Phone 7.
April
2011
Charles Petzold
Charles this month takes a look at multi-touch APIs and delves into the workings of the new gesture support in the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit.
March
2011
Charles Petzold
Stripping down the UI to essentials is important when programming for a smartphone. We'll see just how stripped down an app can get while still being useful, and we'll explore the sound recording APIs in Windows Phone 7 along the way.
February
2011
Charles Petzold
Charles this month serves up an introduction to XNA programming for Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight coders as he shows you how to build a color scroll control for Windows Phone 7.
January
2011
Charles Petzold
The versatile, touch-enabled Thumb control is supported by Silverlight on both the Web and Windows Phone 7. We’’ll show you how to create a shared-code project for both platforms that uses Thumb for both mouse and multi-touch input.
December
2010
Charles Petzold
Charles is intrigued by the Windows Phone 7 touch controls and tries to duplicate them in Windows Presentation Foundation, finding out that good multi-touch coding is a lot harder than it seems.
November
2010
Charles Petzold
One of the ways in which a multi-touch interface attempts to mimic the real world is by introducing inertia. We’ll show you how easy this is to duplicate in your own WPF apps.
October
2010
Charles Petzold
Charles Petzold continues his exploration of multi-touch Manipulation events in the Windows Presentation Foundation and shows you how to design custom classes to decorate elements and provide visual feedback to users.
September
2010
Charles Petzold
Multi-touch has progressed from being a futuristic prop of sci-fi films to a mainstream means of user interface. We’ll show you how support for multi-touch in Windows 7 has filtered down and settled into various areas of the .NET Framework.
August
2010
Charles Petzold
Charles Petzold shows how to extend the limited fluid UI capabilities of Silverlight 4 with new techniques so you too can dazzle users with those cool object entrances and transitions.
July
2010
Charles Petzold
Charles Petzold performs more UI magic by implementing a variation of the drag-and-drop that presents users with a natural, fluid look and feel.
June
2010
Charles Petzold
In Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight, using a Canvas or a single-cell Grid seems very similar. The difference is in how the container appears to the rest of the layout system. Canvas doesn’t participate in layout, so you can use it whenever you need to transcend layout.
May
2010
Charles Petzold
See how to taper text, flip panels, animate a calendar and more--without resorting to complicated math--as Charles Petzold delves into new “pseudo 3D” capabilitie in Silverlight 3, made possible by the new Projection UIElement property.
April
2010
Charles Petzold
Touch isn't just a form of mouse input in Silverlight: Sometimes what's required are controls specialized and optimized for touch.
March
2010
Charles Petzold
A good case could be made that computers should not make noise except in response to a specific user command. We’re going to ignore that and show you how to play custom sounds in a WPF application.
February
2010
Charles Petzold
Charles Petzold continues his investigation into robust XAML coding made possible by Windows Presentation Foundation, this time tackling the complicated process of creating line charts.
January
2010
Charles Petzold
For WPF programmers, one major revelation about the power of the DataTemplate comes with a demonstration of how XAML can turn business objects into bar charts. This column explores how to use DataTemplates to create different types of charts.
September
2009
Charles Petzold
Late last year Microsoft released Calendar and DatePicker controls for WPF in the WPF Toolkit. We’ll show you how they work, and how you can customize them.
June
2009
Charles Petzold
Here Charles Petzold explains several techniques for improving the performance of ItemsControls.
March
2009
Charles Petzold
With Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) you can lay out text on a path, then animate the individual points defining the path and watch the characters bounce around in response.
December
2008
Charles Petzold
Windows Presentation Foundation dependency properties don’t always play well with others. Learn how you can compensate for their lack of notification events.
September
2008
Charles Petzold
Charles Petzold takes an inside look at the flexible bitmap pixel formats offered by the retained-mode graphics features of Windows Presentation Foundation.
June
2008
Charles Petzold
The System.Windows.Shapes namespace is Charles Petzold's namespace of choice for rendering two-dimensional vector graphics in WPF. Here he explains why.
March
2008
Charles Petzold
Charles Petzold demonstrates how Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) templates let you turn common controls into uncommon visual objects.
January
2008
Charles Petzold
This month Charles Petzold explores techniques for generating 3D text in Windows Presentation Foundation.
October
2007
Charles Petzold
Learn what the WPF Animation Classes can do, what they can't, and how to extend them.
July
2007
Charles Petzold
This month Charles Petzold focuses on a very important part of the Viewport3D assemblage—the MeshGeometry3D class that defines the geometry of a 3D object in Windows Communication Foundation.
April
2007
Charles Petzold
Charles Petzold discusses why limiting resources can spawn great creativity.
February
2007
Charles Petzold
This month we welcome Charles Petzold to MSDN Magazine with his first column on building apps for Windows Vista and the .Microsoft NET Framework 3.0.
January
2007
Charles Petzold
December
2005
Charles Petzold
The presentation subsystem in the next version of Windows, code-named "Longhorn," offers powerful new capabilities to developers. This subsystem, code-named "Avalon," allows developers to take advantage of its capabilities through a new markup language code-named "XAML." In addition, modern object-oriented programming languages such as C# and Visual Basic .NET can be used to tie everything together. Because most applications written to Avalon will probably be a mix of XAML and programming code, this article discusses XAML tags used to control page layout along with the procedural code written to respond to events.
January
2004