Chris G. Williams

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Chris G. Williams Beware: I mix tech and personal interests here.

Sep 19

A review of the Logitech MX Series Mouse and Keyboard for developers.

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A few weeks ago, I got an early opportunity to test out the new Logitech MX Series Mouse and Keyboard "designed specifically for Software Developers" (as opposed to most high-end stuff which appeals to power gamers).I had to go out of town for a week right after I got them, but I've been using them nonstop for the last couple weeks, and overall I'm ......

Posted On Friday, September 20, 2019 11:20 AM

May 19

Is building software like building a house, and more importantly, should it be?

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There's a high-profile lawsuit in my industry right now, and as a result,some fascinating (and perhaps lonog-overdue) conversations are taking place.There are people who equate building software to building a house. I've been building software for 34 years, and I built a house 3 years ago. So here's my perspective:The software development industry could ......

Posted On Wednesday, May 1, 2019 3:08 PM

Dec 18

My somewhat colorful non-spoileriffic review of Aquaman (aka Wet Thor)!

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My somewhat colorful non-spoileriffic review of Aquaman (aka Wet Thor)!TL;DR: It's fucking wonderful. See it.My amazing wife managed to secure us a couple of advance seats to see Aquaman, and I have to admit, when asked if I was excited, the answer was "cautiously optimistic" at best.I don't recall all of the trailers, but the one that did stick out ......

Posted On Sunday, December 16, 2018 9:19 PM

May 17

What’s New in C# 7.0 Article in Code Magazine

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My What’s New in C# 7.0 article in Code Magazine is out now. You can find it online, at: http://www.codemag.com/arti... Or you can download the PDF of the entire issue, at: http://bit.ly/2ppnSCH You can also get a print subscription, at: https://www.codemag.com/Mag... ......

Posted On Thursday, May 11, 2017 3:49 PM

Mar 17

MonoGame – v3.6 now available

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MonoGame 3.6 now available! Pardon the interruption of the regular MonoGame blog series, but this is important. There’s a new version of MonoGame now available!! Grab MonoGame 3.6 here: http://www.monogame.net/201... There are a bunch of new features, and a small mountain of bugfixes and enhancements. Read the entire changelog here: ......

Posted On Tuesday, March 7, 2017 1:38 PM Game Development , General Interest , MonoGame

Feb 17

7. MonoGame - Putting Text Onscreen With SpriteFonts

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MonoGame – Putting Text Onscreen With SpriteFonts In MonoGame, text is displayed on the screen in much the same way as sprites, or 2D images. The difference is in how you prepare the font and how you work with it. To display text onscreen, you can create your own images of words, letters and numbers, and display them just like regular sprites, but this ......

Posted On Wednesday, February 22, 2017 3:00 PM Game Development , MonoGame

Feb 17

Amazon Alexa Skills Article in Code Magazine

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My Amazon Alexa Skills article in Code Magazine is out now, and it’s the cover article!!! Very exciting stuff. You can find it online, at: http://www.codemag.com/Arti... Or you can download the PDF of the entire issue, at: http://bit.ly/2kZXSrb You can also get a print subscription, at: https://www.codemag.com/Mag... ......

Posted On Monday, February 20, 2017 10:22 AM General Interest , Alexa , Amazon

Feb 17

2017 Syntax Code & Craft Conference

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Looks like I'll be speaking again this year at the Syntax Code & Craft Conference, in Charleston, SC. Date: May 18 & 19Topic: What's New in C# 7C# 7 introduces a number of great features, including (but not limited to) pattern matching, tuples, and local functions. Additionally, several existing features have also been improved, along with overall ......

Posted On Friday, February 17, 2017 9:53 AM General Interest , speaking

Feb 17

6. MonoGame - Putting a Sprite Onscreen

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MonoGame - Putting a Sprite Onscreen If you aren’t familiar with the term “sprite”, it refers to a two-dimensional (2D) graphical image that you can display onscreen. Sometimes they are individual images, and sometimes you can find them on what is called a SpriteSheet. Here’s an example of a SpriteSheet: We’ll come back to using SpriteSheets later, ......

Posted On Thursday, February 16, 2017 1:48 PM Game Development , MonoGame

Feb 17

5. MonoGame - The Game Loop

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The MonoGame Game Loop (just like the XNA Game Loop) In the previous section, we talked about what you can find in the MonoGame project, so these methods should look familiar. Now I’ll explain a bit more about them, but first, a picture… The Initialize() method is called only once, when your game first starts up. The LoadContent() method is called from ......

Posted On Monday, February 13, 2017 2:35 PM Game Development , MonoGame

Adventures in 3D Printing

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Background: I have a Micro 3D Printer, which runs (usually headless) off an OctoPrint server, running on a Raspberry Pi 3. I moved a few months ago and the whole setup sat in a box until this weekend. I start setting everything up again. I'm not a Linux expert by any means, but this thing is relatively plug and play, when it works. Fire everything up... ......

Posted On Monday, February 13, 2017 10:42 AM General Interest , Iot

Feb 17

4. MonoGame - What’s in the Starting Project?

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MonoGame - What’s in the Starting Project? Now that you have MonoGame & Visual Studio installed, go ahead and create a MonoGame Windows Project. You can call it whatever you want. In the Solution Explorer, you’ll see a Content folder (more on this in a bit), an icon file (put your cursor on it), and finally two .cs files: Program.cs and Game1.cs ......

Posted On Tuesday, February 7, 2017 12:29 PM Game Development , MonoGame

Feb 17

3. MonoGame - Project Types Explained

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MonoGame Project Types Explained In this post, I’ll cover the various types of MonoGame projects you can create within Visual Studio. Assuming you’re running MonoGame 3.5.1 (from the installer) your New Project dialog should look something like the picture above. If you’re pulling down more recent (i.e. unreleased) builds, then you’ll likely notice ......

Posted On Monday, February 6, 2017 2:08 PM Game Development , MonoGame

2. MonoGame - What do I need, and where do I get it?

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MonoGame - What You Need, and Where To Get It… Development Environment You’re going to need an IDE. If you’ve been developing for a while, you probably already have one of your own, or at least a preference. If you’re completely new to all of this, then it comes down to your choice of operating system. If you’re running Windows, get Visual Studio 2015 ......

Posted On Monday, February 6, 2017 1:06 PM Game Development , MonoGame

1. MonoGame - Why MonoGame?

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Why MonoGame? You’re thinking about getting into game development, and you’re trying to decide how to get started. There are a number of great reasons to go with MonoGame. Maybe you found Unity to be confusing and even a bit overwhelming. Maybe you prefer to “live in the code.” Maybe you’ve used XNA in the past, and want to work with something similar. ......

Posted On Monday, February 6, 2017 5:24 PM Game Development , MonoGame

Beginning MonoGame

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I’ve had a few folks ask me for a good “Getting Started” tutorial for MonoGame over the last year and I’ve done a few talks on the subject, but hadn’t really had an opportunity to put anything together until now. Instead of writing some massive thing that I never finish, I’m going to keep these posts relatively short, and focus on individual aspects ......

Posted On Monday, February 6, 2017 5:02 PM Game Development , MonoGame

Jan 17

Alexa, make me a sandwich.

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Just wrapped up a pretty beefy article on Alexa programming for the upcoming IoT issue of Code Magazine. That was a lot of fun, and has definitely rekindled my interest in IoT and Home Automation. I've been spending a lot of time working with SmartThings and Z-Wave devices, and my Amazon Echo lately. Getting them all talking to each other. Mostly everything ......

Posted On Thursday, January 12, 2017 1:47 PM Iot , Alexa , Amazon , SmartThings

May 16

Speaker Spotlight

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I'm speaking at the Syntax Code & Craft Convention this weekend, and today they've featured me in their speaker spotlight blog post. The prose is a bit more effusive and flowery than I'm normally comfortable with, but there's nothing in there that's technically untrue, so... enjoy!https://2016.syntaxco... ......

Posted On Tuesday, May 3, 2016 10:10 AM speaking

Apr 16

2016 Syntax Code & Craft Conference

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If you're in the SC Lowcountry, or not too far away, you should check out the Syntax Code & Craft Conference (www.syntaxcon.com) the weekend of May 6. We've got quite the lineup (including yours truly...) My talk...AN INTRODUCTION TO MONOGAMEIs there a technology game developers are looking at for not only the Windows ecosystem, but also cross-platform ......

Posted On Tuesday, April 26, 2016 8:57 AM Game Development , speaking

Dec 15

Danzig - Skeletons (a review)

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So I listened to Danzig's new release SKELETONS today... TL;DR; It's ok. His voice sounds great, but the selection of covers is pretty lackluster, with the exception of N.I.B. and a couple others.The Review....Let me start by saying I'm a fan of the musician/singer Glenn Danzig. I've been listening to everything he's touched since the early 80's. Misfits, ......

Posted On Wednesday, December 2, 2015 12:58 PM Reviews

Nov 15

ADOM now on Steam, a review.

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It's hard to believe that I've been playing this game for nearly 20 years. My favorite game (ever) has just released on Steam this week. If you like RPGs and/or Roguelike Games, you owe it to yourself to check out Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM) on Steam. Since this is release week, it's on sale. Get It Here: http://store.steampowered.c... ......

Posted On Tuesday, November 17, 2015 1:38 PM

Mar 14

v1 of my .NET wrapper for Coinbase API has been released

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As the title says, v1.0 of Coinbase.NET, my C# wrapper for the Coinbase API is now released. You can get it here: https://github.com/chrisgwilliams/Coinbase.NET/releases

Posted On Monday, March 17, 2014 12:59 PM bitcoin , cryptocurrency , coinbase , github , release

Mar 14

Are you using cryptocurrencies? Request for info.

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Hey everyone,I'm working on an open source library involving Bitcoin and I was wondering how many (if any) of you are currently working with cryptocurrencies in your apps & games? Whether you are buying/selling them, or just accepting them as a form of payment, I'd like to get some idea of what you're doing, what APIs you're hitting, what you think ......

Posted On Thursday, March 13, 2014 10:39 AM bitcoin , cryptocurrency , microtransactions

Feb 14

upcoming user group / conference visits

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The next 6 months are going to be pretty fun (and by fun, I mean hectic.) In addition to a couple of interesting side projects (writing & video), I'm also going back on the speaker circuit. Fortunately, I'll be able to tie a few of these stops to some "vacation" destinations. 3/18: GSP Developers (Greenville, SC) 4/22: Enterprise Developers Guild ......

Posted On Wednesday, February 26, 2014 9:41 AM General Interest , speaking , user groups

Jan 14

Are Cryptocurrencies Ready?

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Are Cryptocurrencies Ready For Mainstream Use? Are we? I'm a big fan of the major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and LiteCoin (LTC). I’m not really paying any attention to the dozens of derivative (and in some cases satirical) alternatives, such as Dogecoin and Coinye, but I think Bitcoin and Litecoin have a real shot at permanence. Having said ......

Posted On Tuesday, January 14, 2014 2:43 PM bitcoin , litecoin , cryptocurrency , financial