TWC9 - Hack Powerwheels, APIs for Wikipedia, Smooth Streaming, Arduinos and more

Picks of the week
Love the Holland shirt, Dan! Thanks
When are you guys going to post up the code for that laser graffiti wall you had a the PDC? Just wondering...
That GPS plotting thing screams for somebody to create some sort of gigantic digital etch-a-sketch drawing. Guys, what are the odds of you people buying me a flight and tickets to Mix if I promise to drive around and plot a gigantic Nine Guy in the Nevada
desert as a sort of scam promotional thing?
rofl. Thanks guys
For anyone coming over, at my front door I have a gun, I mean a cannon, or a bazooka, all wired up using the sensor API. Pity the unannounced flower delivery guy or random CH9 stalker.
I love Holland, I need an excuse to visit, but it's hard with a 6-month old
Bas, agree on the etch-a-sketch, it was the first thing that popped into my mind.
As for your odds of us getting you a ticket, hmm, probably low, the problem is we have plenty of other folks who are paying their own way and are asking us for permission to get inside the inflatable Channel 9 guy (which is pretty cool I must say)
Re: destructors and finalizers:-
No wonder there was so much confusion in the teaching of these concepts in the early days of .NET if the C# spec got it wrong! I remember so many tutorials where people were told all about finalizers "and this is how you can clean up like you do in a C++ destructor". NO NO NO! The equivalent of a destructor is implementing IDisposable (and calling it in the appropriate place) - finalizers should never have been taught, even in intermediate programming books, let along beginners ones. Interestinly Managed C++ as included in Visual Studio 2003 actually emboddied this error in that C++ destructors were implemented as finalizers, thus causing much confusion. The sucessor, C++/CLI, included in Visual Studio 2005 onwards changed it so that if a class has a destructor, in the CIL code it will actually implement IDisposable instead and calls to Dispose() are made in the same places they would be to the destructor of an unmanaged class.
Re: Visual Basic 2010 feature cut.
No iterators? What the heck guys, you had over 2 years!
Re: HLSL
It's not that hard. You know before HLSL you had to write what was essentially assembler code for the GPU. That was hard (although back then GPUs were a lot simpler - you couldn't have loops for example).
Welcome back Brian!
Great show, thanks for the link guys.
@Chadk,
Thank you, sir! It's so good to be back.
@Pete,
LOL!
Hey PerfectPhase, the current ETA for the PDC laser graffiti is Febuary/March but we also will shortly be posted a simplified version called "Light Painting" of this that does far more of the "how / what" while Jeremiah's laser graffiti article will explain how he did a bunch of the more complex stuff.
I also was afraid of posting 5 30 page long articles back to back.