johnhforrest.com » Programming

My advice for undergraduate CS majors

John — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 20:00:19 +0000

This won’t be a story about how I had a great idea and became the next Mark Zuckerberg, because frankly—I didn’t. By no means do I consider myself, or my current position extraordinary. I see myself as an average person with a passion for software development, who used this passion to succeed in university, something that anybody can do if they try. Sure, this path may be more difficult depending on what school you go to, what people you know, or what opportunities you were given, but I believe anyone who puts in the time and effort can excel in the software industry.…

d3, wow Forum Readers Currently Bugged

John — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 04:24:29 +0000

Blizzard recently updated the HTML of the pagination so the threads are currently only able to download the first page. I have posted a fix to the App Hub and the update should be available in the next few days. I apologize for the inconvenience!

I am working on a change in the underlying engine so that the HTML configuration can be downloaded on the fly from my server rather than being hard-coded in the app. Additionally, I plan on adding functionality to allow you to directly access the URL of each forum and thread, so if this happens in the future you will be able to copy and paste the value into the web browser and view it manually.…

Diablo 3 Forum Reader Certified!

John — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 04:53:13 +0000

The WoW Forum Reader has finally for Diablo 3! Now, you are able to follow all of the latest updates of the recently started Closed Beta right on your Windows Phone! Tomorrow morning the app will be released on the marketplace, so give it a shot and download it for FREE.

See more at the full project page: here.…

WoW Forum Reader 2.0

John — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 18:45:33 +0000

See the project page for all of the screen shots and information on the app.

Last week I released a new version of my app, WoW Forum Reader. I spent a lot of time overhauling the main UI to make interacting with the app more straight forward and fun. Here’s a list of features added in 2.0:

Blue post tracker
Realm forums added
Favorites list for forums
Context menus on forums and threads (hold down on an item for it to pop up)
A brand new UI for the front page

See the screenshots below for the latest changes.

The opening screen now consists of 3 panorama items.…

WoW Forum Reader

John — Thu, 05 May 2011 03:05:23 +0000

I’ve just recently released another app for the Windows Phone 7: WoW Forum Reader. There are two versions, a paid version with no advertisements, and a free version with advertisements (although the description says otherwise at the moment). The Zune links are below:

Full: http://social.zune.net/redirect?type=phoneApp&id=f4a94251-2874-e011-81d2-78e7d1fa76f8
Lite: http://social.zune.net/redirect?type=phoneApp&id=94dd91a5-2974-e011-81d2-78e7d1fa76f8

Although I haven’t actually played any Blizzard games for some time now, I do occasionally check the forums to see what’s going on in Azeroth. Having tried to do this in the Windows Phone browser made me wonder why no one has made any client apps to read Blizzard forums–the task isn’t impossibly difficult and a lot of people read the forums on a daily basis.…

Windows Phone 7 Development

John — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 18:03:07 +0000

Today my first 2 apps were published on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. Although nothing groundbreaking by any means, building the apps was a fun experience and a good introduction to Silverlight. Probably the hardest thing for me was learning the framework, but once I figured everything out it was pretty smooth sailing. stackoverflow.com is a great resource for any development questions on the Windows Phone 7 because they have such a large community of C# developers. I visited SO many times while I was developing and 90% of my questions had already been posted and solved by someone else.

To see more information on my apps, please visit the project page (http://johnhforrest.com/projects/windows-phone-7-apps/).…

Mashups

John — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 05:58:57 +0000

A Quick Update…

I haven’t added any new content for the past few weeks, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve been completely idle. Unfortunately, most of what I’ve been doing has done little to further my development abilities, but I have found fun distractions nonetheless.

One of my latest addictions is a game called Heroes of Newerth (http://www.heroesofnewerth.com/). HoN is essentially a clone of DotA packaged as a new game that includes a matchmaking systems, and extensive player statistics. Much of the items and heroes are essentially the same, but the game’s developer has created new names, models, and lore for just about everything.…

Parameterized SQL Queries in C#

John — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 23:21:52 +0000

Introduction

Parameterizing your SQL queries is a technique that I mentioned I used in my code last post. Now, I’m not expert in SQL (I’m not even sure the UPDATE command I’m going to show is considered a ‘query’), but from I know from my class in software security that using this technique is a great way to protect against SQL injections. I’m not sure if they offer any performance benefits, but they are a lot cleaner to use when you are looping over data as opposed to concatenating strings to generate your query. And as I mentioned before, cleaner code = faster development time, so that’s always a huge plus in my book.…