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Conclusion At the end of the last section I tied off a discussion of the graphics rendering in AvalonLife with a look at its performance running a large model on a large grid. There is so much happening under the hood that I had sworn it would crawl when it came time to actually draw [...]

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything to this site, and while one excuse is that I was first looking for, and then ramping up in, a new job, another excuse is that I have spent the last four or five weeks checking out Windows Presentation Foundation and all the cool new interface programming techniques [...]

Drawing the Grid When I first started mucking around with the implementation of Conway’s Game of Life in WPF my thought was that I would create a drawing surface and use System.Drawing objects to paint in my grid. I went as far as looking into which WPF object would be right to do the drawing [...]

Resources and Styles In the previous section I illustrated the basic XAML declaration of the AvalonLife main window, and talked about the resulting structure of the application’s interface both in terms of the layout and object hierarchy. The code that I presented, however, would not create anything of interest if it were compilable, because most [...]

XAML and the User Interface What good is a simulation without an interface? Not much. Of course, the word interface can be interpreted in various ways. I have worked with simulation models in the past that chugged along behind the scenes for hours or days, a blinking cursor in a command window the only sign [...]

AvalonLife’s Architecture Most of this article is about the new GUI technologies in Windows Presentation Foundation, but I think it is worth devoting a few free web column-inches to the nature of the model and controller. I’ve always enjoyed simulation programming, and although this is a very simple simulation it does illustrate some interesting techniques. [...]

The Game of Life The Game of Life was invented by Cambridge University mathematician John Conway, probably some time in the late 1960’s. It first gained widespread attention after being mentioned in a 1970 Scientific American column on mathematical games. If you’re interested in the history of it, there is a very good dissertation on [...]

I set out a few weeks ago to build a simple example application that takes advantage of the new user interface technologies in Microsoft’s Windows Vista. These technologies are packaged as .NET 3.0, which is an extension of the 2.0 version of the framework. Extension is the right term, I think, despite the fact that [...]