Hassan Selim's Blog

My worries about overusing Lambda Expressions in C#

06 Jul 2012 20:13:10 +0000

Recently, I was thinking about one of the cases were you have to use the IDisposable pattern, the case were you need to unsubscribe from events and delegates to allow your object to get disposed by the Garbage Collector (some people miss that point), and this made me think about my hobby of overusing Lambda Expressions and if that might also cause similar problems. So I did a bunch of tests today and learned a lot of things and came up with a workaround that would make me avoid using the IDisposable pattern when all I need it for is to unsubscribe from events...

Very Late Post about my Bachelor Project

13 Feb 2012 01:42:45 +0000

So it’s almost a year since I last posted something on this blog, but it was a very busy year full of awesome events for me.
Last time I blogged (March 2011) was during my “empty semester” where I actually dropped everything and decided to go do my Bachelor Project in Augsburg, Germany :)
So here I’m going to talk about the awesome stuff I did there...

How to write your own Minecraft Server wrapper in C#

29 Mar 2011 16:21:51 +0000

I know some of you were expecting me to blog about my recent trip to Lebanon, but it’ll be a long post so I’m blogging about the next best thing, a little sample project I worked on during my trip to Lebanon, I wrote a very simple wrapper for the Minecraft Server in C# :) ...

Jail-breaking and Pirating, What's wrong and what's Not !

26 Nov 2010 21:04:06 +0000

Today as I was checking my Twitter Timeline in the morning (as usual), I read about something that we all knew it was coming sooner or later but I was surprised that it was that early.
What is it? Windows Phone 7 has been Jail-broken, and a website was made for the tool used to Jail-break it !
Later today, I read a blog post containing a very harsh response to that tool, and explaining how guilty it’s developers are, I wrote a comment on that post trying to calm down the guy a bit and defending that tool, but the comment didn’t get posted yet (as of the time of writing this) and it was a very long comment, so I decided to explain my opinion in more detail here on my Blog :) ...

Twitter's 21 Sept. Hack, How did it happen ?

23 Sep 2010 16:30:29 +0000

On the 21st of September 2010 some time in the morning, a Twitter Hack (or Exploit) appeared and started to spread !
People started seeing blacked-out tweets and when they hovered over them they found themselves automatically retweeting them and others got redirected to other pages, however people using 3rd party Twitter client weren’t affected and saw Tweets with weird text instead.
I discovered it some time around 1pm GMT, and started to understand how it worked, and in this post I’m going to explain to you how the Hack worked :) ...

What I think of Silverlight

14 Sep 2010 09:19:13 +0000

I noticed that the talk about Silverlight vs. HTML/CSS/Javascript heated up recently, I don't know why, maybe it started because of this post (which was on the Silverlight Team blog) followed by these posts or maybe because Windows Phone 7 is about to be released (which will only run apps programmed with Silverlight or XNA) or maybe because HTML5 is getting more popular.
Anyways, it's in time with the (late) blog post that I wanted to write about the gallery app that I made some time ago, I'll express my opinion based on my experience with both technologies, but of course I wont be able to talk about Javascript in a lot of depth because I'm not that experienced with Javascript...

I’m Back, and with a New Look !

24 Aug 2010 13:24:29 +0000

It’s been a long time since I posted on my blog, I don’t know why because I have a lot of news to share with you but I didn’t have the time to blog about them.
Anyways, I’m back and I’ll try to make use of what’s left from my summer vacation :) ...

Creating HDR Images using HLSL on XNA

01 May 2010 23:43:34 +0000

A few days ago I started working on a Tool that would make creating HDR Images out of 2 over-exposed and under-exposed Images a very simple task !
I implemented it using HLSL (High Level Shader Language) as a Pixel Shader Function, why? because it’s faster that way and I want to get used to writing HLSL code :) ...

Visual Studio 2010 Launch Day

12 Apr 2010 23:02:05 +0000

Since everybody is writing Blog Post about the Visual Studio 2010 Launch Day, I decided to write my own too :)
If you’re following me on Twitter (or FaceBook) you’ll notice that I’ve tweeted about it (who didn’t anyway?)
Since I’m a not a pro and don’t have a lot to say, I’ll just link to other blog posts and I’ll talk about other things that are related to VS2010...

Cairo Code Camp 2010

04 Mar 2010 13:14:40 +0000

I know it’s a bit late to blog about this, it’s just that I was busy during the last few days (and wasn’t able to manage my time properly) and I finally got the chance to write this now while sitting in the Train on my way to Alexandria.
Anyways, if you don’t know, Cairo Code Camp is a yearly event organized by a group called “dotNetwork”, this is the second year for this event, it was held in my University “The German University in Cairo” (GUC) in the 27th & 28th of February (last year it was held in the BUE), in this event a lot of speakers form around the world (usually MVPs) come to talk to us (mainly) about the new Technologies made by Microsoft, so this year there were sessions about the ASP.NET 4.0, C# 4.0, Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010...

Taking Photos of 3D Scenes in XNA

21 Feb 2010 23:31:37 +0000

As you might know, I’m a HUGE fan of “Colin McRae: DiRT 2” the Racing Game.
I like everything in the game, but one of the things that grabbed my attention was the Loading Screen because it switches from a 3D Environment to a 2D image on a Photograph in a very cool way, and one day when I was thinking about it from a programmer’s point of view, I found out that this part can be easily implemented on XNA, so I decided to do it in my free time...

Technology IS NOT Witchcraft !!!

13 Feb 2010 19:14:22 +0000

Being one of the few Tech Geeks in the family is a terrible thing, if you’re like me (or if you’ve seen this funny post) then you’ll know what I mean.
However it wasn’t always like that, at first is was fun to help people with their gadgets and sometimes flattering to see people thank you for your efforts although you did almost nothing, but then it starts to get annoying as the help requests become a chore, and specially after learning a lot of advanced stuff, you feel silly doing all these easy stuff.
That’s why I tried to go into their heads and find out how they look at these things...

My First Attempt to make a Custom Shader on XNA

03 Feb 2010 02:15:19 +0000

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about Custom Shaders, FX Files and HLSL (High Level Shader Language), and now after I understood their concepts I decided to implement what I though was very hard to do, Sea Waves ! ...

Welcome to my New Website !

28 Jan 2010 22:39:21 +0000

Hello everybody !
At last, I finally made myself a new website, now I have a real blog were people can comment on my posts :)
I always like to do things myself instead of relying on Templates and Blogging Services like WordPress and BlogSpot, so I made this website with all it's pages and it's RSS Feed from scratch during my (very short :@) midyear vacation ! ...

Implementing 3D Stereoscopes and 3D Red-Cyan Anaglyphs on XNA

11 Jan 2010 02:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I read a post on mashable.com about YouTube's new 3D video feature and I read about all the new 3D technologies that were in CES 2010, so I decided I should try implementing something like this on XNA.
Of course the easiest way to display 3D images is using the cross-eyed stereoscopic approach where the output is 2 images displayed side by side and you cross your eyes so that your right eye sees the left image and your left eye sees the right image, so you see a 3D image floating between your eyes and your screen as a result of these 2 images combined and interpreted by your brain...

My "Introduction to Communication Networks" Course Project

30 Dec 2009 02:00:00 +0000

I just had my CSEN503 Project Evaluation today, we were required to make a Chat Room Server and Client that uses TCP Socket Connections and we had to program it in JAVA (the GUI was a bonus), we worked in teams of 2 or 3, I was late to submit my team members list so I was put with a random student :S
So, since the evaluations are done, I can safely post the Project's Code without any worries :) ...

Making a Game Engine to make creating XNA Games even easier !

29 Jul 2009 02:00:00 +0000

I started working on a Game Engine to help with various things in every game I make, like Input Handling, Screen Managment, 3D Text and Menues.
This "GameHelperEngine" XNA Game Library Project consists of a bunch of classes that were written as part of previous projects, for example, the Input handling class was part of Asteroids v1.3 and the Screen Management and Menus classes were (and still are) part of my Checkers 3D project...

Porting my CSEN401 JAVA Checkers Game Project to C# & XNA

14 Apr 2009 02:00:00 +0000

As part of my CSEN401 course, I have to handle a group project, the project should be either a "TetraVex Game" or a "Checkers Game" coded in Java using the Java Swing Library.
So Me and a friend called "Mohammed Nagy" teamed up to make the Checkers Game...

Discovering UPD Clients

19 Dec 2008 02:00:00 +0000

I've been working on a UDP Chat Client for a few weeks, it basically enables computer on the same LAN (Local Area Network) to be able to chat together using the UDP protocol.
I know this might sound useless but it could be great in a Huge LAN like the one in the GUC, students in different rooms in the University can chat together (COOL ?), and I also wanted to learn about UDP...

At last, Microsoft has released XNA Game Studio 3.0, Hurray !!!

30 Oct 2008 02:00:00 +0000

At last, Microsoft has released XNA Game Studio 3.0, Hurray !!!
This new version of XNA is even more powerful than the previous one since it uses the new Visual C# 2008 Express and .NET Framework 3.5, it also has new features that were requested by the users, and now you can use it to make game for Zune devices...

Making Connect4 3D BETA while enjoying the Beach :)

21 Jul 2008 02:00:00 +0000

While I was enjoying the beach in "Ras El Hekma" I decided to start making the 3D BETA version of Connect4 (see this post's image).
I used the same code (only made a few changes to have a correct C# syntax) and divided it into methods to be easier to understand, then I made the models for the chip and the board (the modeling took about 6 hours) then I made them appear in the window and added some cool stuff like the ability to rotate the view camera by Right-Clicking and Dragging and the 3D rotating text that appear when a player wins (I had prepared this 3D text a few days before)...

I programmed a Connect 4 game (with JAVA) during my Vacation !

19 Jul 2008 02:00:00 +0000

I was going to "Ras El Hekma" (somewhere near "Marsa Matrooh") on a Vacation, but since I'm a geek I took my laptop with me and decided to make a Connect4 game during the 3-hour travel so we can play Connect4 there at night, I started to make it using JAVA and planned to make a 3D version later...

Asteroids 1.0's Source Code

15 Jun 2008 02:00:00 +0000

Yes, I know I am in the middle of the final exams but I was bored so I decided to let everybody see the C# code of my game, if you just want to view the code you can use Notepad to open the ".cs" files but you wont understand anything because the keywords aren't colored, so I recommend that you download and install Visual C# 2005 and XNA Game Studio 2.0 so you can view and edit the code and recompile the game ! ...

The second update for my game "Asteroids v1.2" !

30 May 2008 02:00:00 +0000

At last I finished making the second update for my game "Asteroids v1.2" !!
Many friends were bored from the standard yellow bullets, so I added a BOMB POWER-UP, you have a 25% possibility to it get when you destroy an asteroid...

The release of "Asteroids v1.1 Update" to fix some bugs.

21 Mar 2008 02:00:00 +0000

I released "Asteroids v1.1 Update" because my friends Ramy and Michael discovered a few ways to cheat in the game so they reached over level 70 so they got bored and closed the game so I disabled these cheats (now you will hardly reach level 20) and fixed a few bugs...

The release of my first game, "Asteroids" !

11 Mar 2008 02:00:00 +0000

I released my first game, it is called "Asteroids", it took about 4 months to complete it, 50% of it is from XNA tutorials and all the models and sounds are from XNA starter kits, but I made lots of changes to the code and edited some models using "XSI Mod Tool"...