Projects

Like many technical people, I like to fool around on various projects when I have a chance.  Some of them relate to my day job, while others are random things I dabble in every so often or want to learn.  Those that make it past some minimum level of usefulness eventually get posted on this website; the more substantial ones are below, while shorter code samples tend to appear on my blog instead.

PhotoSuru

The biggest project I’ve worked on – and that I can say is primarily my work – is photoSuru, the WPF rich media developer sample available at www.photosuru.com.  Of course, I did it as a part of my work at Microsoft, so having 8 hours a day to invest in something really made a difference!  I’ve written a bit of an insider’s guide to photoSuru for those interested in how it went together and how you can make photoSuru work for you.

NicholasArmstrong.com

As you have no doubt guessed, this website is another project of mine.  Though based on a number of existing technologies, I did create the look and feel of the site and all of the content on it.  My post on the revamp has more details.

Things You Learn in Engineering

Unsurprisingly, you learn quite a number of things in Engineering that you’d never expect to learn.  What is surprising is the variety and peculiarity of things that  you do actually get taught.  After a lengthy conversation about the things we had “learned”, I threw together a page of items in the UW first year information package style so that prospective students might get a complete idea of all the things they might learn at UW.

Coldfire: The Computer Engineering Experience

UW Computer Engineers will all remember the Coldfire boards, the lovely hardware units that we got to write an operating system for. To commemorate the… ahem, entire week… of my life that I lost thanks to the experience, I designed a desktop background.

WPF Title Animator

When I was just starting out with WPF, I wanted to get a bit more experience with WPF Animation, and so I took a Saturday morning to build a neat little move-style title animator.  It animates a series of “titles”, a position/name string, on to a black screen at a configurable interval; more details, and a link to the source, are on the WPF Title Animator page.