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My feet wandered back into the area of old Millbrook this weekend, and I expect they will tread that way again soon, and hopefully for years to come. This region, like the Pine Barrens in the Southern part of the state, completely fascinates me, and for the same reason. For such a small state New [...]

I entered the woods near Chester, New Jersey by stepping over a thin cable slung between two wooden posts and heading up a narrow gravel-covered track that disappeared in leafy dimness. The better part of forty-five minutes later I was barely a mile in, but then I had the camera with me, and had seen [...]

Kittatinny Mountain begins at the place that is truly a water gap, thrusting its granite shoulder to the sky just East of the spot where the slim ribbon of interstate 80 skips across the Delaware River and enters the state of Pennsylvania. For many people this is perhaps all of the mountain that they see, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]