Supermagical is one of those games my sister insisted I play with her. We had a couple of weekend sessions where we’d play together and it was a lot of fun. The game itself is a variant of the match-3 orb-shooting genres. The cute graphics and sound make it entertaining, if not sometimes frustrating, to play.

Spirit Walkers: Curse of the Cypress Witch (SW) was free for a time and I figured I’d give it a try. I thought it was developed by the same group that made Master of Mystery: Crime of Fashion, but actually developed by a different studio. Both games are a blend of hidden object and puzzle solving. But, I think the one game that did it best was Mystery of Mortlake Mansion. Nonetheless SW was a good game with a variety of puzzles beyond hidden objects. However, the problem I had with Master of Mystery: Crime of Fashion was selecting an item and having it not match up with where my finger was also present in this game.

I was just talking to some friends about my new-ish job. I am happiest when I have a series of problems that are solvable, but the answer may not be evident right away. It’s sort of like puzzle-solving. The solutions are there (on the internet), but for your specific problem, you have to massage existing solutions to fit.

I just found out that ASP.NET won’t take any disabled .NET form fields (e.g., TextBox, DropDownList) on postback. Another weird quirk is changing a .NET Button control’s text via JavaScript isn’t recognized in postback, either. This seems a little conflicting, no? What makes it even worse is when .NET’s validation controls (RequiredFieldValidtor) are thrown into the mix–on postback, all of the validation error messages pop up.

The original Tomb Raider from the mid-90s has that special place in my gaming history. My sister got me a copy for my PC and she had a copy for her PlayStation at her condo. At first, it was a weekend activity. When she came home to visit, we’d play together on my PC for a little bit. Then, being the impatient child, I eventually started playing on my own with my sister mirroring my progress on her PlayStation (or, vice-versa where she would get ahead and I would play catch-up). In a sense it was still “playing together” but not quite.

I remember tumbling around Lara’s new house practicing various moves. I remember Lara’s “signature” pullup from a hanging position to being able to swing her legs up onto a ledge. And who remembers the step-forward, step-back, turn three times one way, then turn three times the other and do a back flip cheat to get all of the weapons and ammo? I remember doing all of those annoying block puzzles that were part of what defined the game, aside from Lara’s cleavage and generally being a female protagonist in what was/is a male-dominated genre.

When I heard about the reboot for the series, I was both excited and skeptical. The intro cinematic promised a lot, but would it live up to it? I kept up with the reviews, many of which were positive and, of course, with the comment on Lara’s breast size being within reasonable size (for once). I was most skeptical about block puzzles, which were predominant in the previous game, but thankfully not so much here.

Needless to say, it was the first game I played and completed on my brand new gaming rig and I have to say, it was a good choice for breaking it in. Aside from the consistent battle with nausea while playing the game and some other issues, I was fairly impressed with all aspects of the game.

Squeezing in one last coding post before the new year! I have been putting off the login logic for my project because of my sub-project choices, it was the least interesting. And the most daunting. However, I sucked it up and started implementing bits (no pun intended) of it at a time. The one part that had me ground to a complete stop was when I tried to verify a valid login against the database and it kept coming up false.

I thought I’d break the dry spell of gaming reviews (or conversely, the flood of coding posts) with a game I just finished.I thought I’d give a holiday present in the form of a long overdue game review. Lost Winds was originally written for the Wii, but has received an iOS port. I was not aware of this at first and most of my frustration with the game was with the controls. Otherwise, the game is nice and short, easy to play in short periods of time, aesthetically pleasing, and is worth giving a try.

As the nature of projects go, suddenly I wasn’t only reading a spreadsheet, but also needing to generate a spreadsheet. For the client’s convenience, of course. Although in this case, it takes a minute to fill out two fields by hand so it’s a pretty trivial perk of the app, but it was a good exercise.

I recently found out that using Interop for “Automation” of Office products is a bad idea, server-side. The word “Automation” is capitalized but not very clear. I understood it to mean any code (e.g., ASP.NET) that attempts to read from or write to an Office product (e.g., using the Interop libraries). MS Office is meant for human-interaction and should be used that way.

So, I sucked it up and went with a third-party library: NPOI

I try not to gripe too much about .NET, but I spent way too long trying to puzzle this out on my development machine. I don’t even want to think about the potential problems on production just yet. The basic premise: two DropDownLists, the second is dynamically populated based on a selection on the first. Using PostBack made this task quite trivial, but I’m not a fan of page reloads for this kind of thing, so I wanted to incorporate some AJAX. What a tangled mess it became.

Every workplace has a different coding “standard” (which are often more like guidelines than set rules) and adjusting to different standards can be difficult, especially since I have been coding mostly for myself for the past year. However, sometimes standards are a little illuminating into the languages you are working with. One small topic I have been wrestling with is C# members vs. properties.

One of the tasks I’ve been working on for my project at work is parsing through an Excel spreadsheet. In a brief summary, the data from the spreadsheet will get transferred to a database. In a more detailed summary, the data from the spreadsheet will get translated into objects which then get put into the database.

But first, I wanted to make sure I was getting the correct values. So, my interim task was first to parse through the spreadsheet, stick it in a DataSet, and output onto an HTML page. The next task was to take the values in the DataSet, put it in an object, and pull out values from that object when displaying on the HTML page.