I am happy to report that I have had a reasonably easy run of using OpenCV from a .NET C++/CLI project, I was initially worried that the two might not play well together, but so far – so good! I am wrapping some machine vision code that uses OpenCV in a C++/CLI assembly so that I can call it from C# code. I have kept the rather creepy CLI stuff to a minimum it just implements the interface, everything else is vanilla C++ using the standard library.

The only thing I had to do to get rid of build errors was to make sure that each _proper_ C++ file in the project had the following value for the ‘Common Language RunTime Support’ build setting -> ‘No Common Language RunTime Support’!

So if you are toying with the idea of developing some OpenCV based software from within C++/CLI, I say give it twirl it makes interacting with .NET much easier than (say) using COM or similar!

Just catching up with things after Christmas, one thing that escaped my notice in December was that Google released version 1.6.1 of their Cloud App Engine SDK on 13th. of December. There’s not a huge amount of interest really in this release, but two items did catch my eye:

You can now select how much CPU power and memory is available for your fronted instances, you can select this from a small set of presets in the app dashboard – however google warns that selecting a higher preset will incur extra cost! We sometimes run into soft memory limit problems on our frontends so this may be of great use to us, but I do worry about the $$ !

Google have also released a new experimental document conversion API which they say contains OCR functionality – I look forward to testing this and will be very interested to see how well the OCR preforms as it can be a very tricky thing to get right! I suppose that this is an API to the same OCR functionality that they have in google docs….

Oh and they have added an API for programmatically reading the application logs, this may come in handy for automated testing!

More details about the release can be found here:

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/12/app-engine-161-released.html

If you are hooking magento up to realex for payment on your eCommerce website then you will most likely be using the payments module kindly provided by StudioForty9 in Cork.

As part of configuring this you will need to tell realex what your cart’s ‘return URL’ is, this URL has changed since the introduction of the newer version of this module (v2.0) which it seems is for use with magneto v1.5 and greater. The new URL format for use with the newer module is:

In case you are still using the old module, the url format for that is:

I was having some trouble getting Visual Studio 2010 to stop at breakpoints in some unmanaged C++ code that’s in a C++/CLI project that I am working on, and as we all know Software Developments rapidly stops being fun if your debugger is broken!

I am using C++/CLI as a thin wrapper around this vanilla C++ functionality so that I could export it to .NET. All was working fine except that the breakpoints in the C++ code did not work. After some searching I found this post:

http://rhnatiuk.wordpress.com/2010/11/13/managednative-debugging-in-cc

The post suggested that I should set the ‘Enable unmanaged code Debugging’ setting of the start-up project (not the C++/CLI project), so I enabled it and the brakepoints started working fine – so big thanks Roman for the tip!

Some time ago I posted that some of Pride Design’s websites had got through to the finals of Irish Web Awards but I haven’t posted since to let you know how we got on…..

Well the really good news is that Cheffactor won in the ‘Best Microsite’ category – so we are very happy indeed! Here’s a picture of ‘Webby’ having a well earned pint and tasty nibble at the award ceremony, he can’t half throw ‘em back!

Congratulations to our favourite Mobile App Localization company Tethras who won the Dublin round of the seedcorn competition. Best of luck for the finals!

Here is a very handy article that explains how you can alter your app’s setup project in Visual studio to install an Event Log Component so that your non-service app, when installed, can write to the windows event log without getting security errors:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f5dcf6h3(v=vs.80).aspx

Good news! Four of Pride Design‘s websites have got through to the finalists list in the Irish Web Awards 2011, my favourite – The Cork News has got through to the finals in two categories – Most Beautiful Website in Ireland & Best Online Publication Categories.

Pride Design are also in the finals in the Web Agency of the Year category, so here’s hoping we bring home some gold!

cheffactor.ie – Best Microsite Category.
hautemama.ie – Best eCommerce / Services Website Category.
cinnamoncottage.ie – Best SME/Small Business Website.
The Cork News -Most Beautiful Website in Ireland & Best Online Publication.

More details can be found here: http://webawards.ie/2011-finalists/

Good luck to all the finalists!

A setup project I was working on in Microsoft Visual Studio suddenly stopped building with the following error;

An error occurred while validating. HRESULT = '8001010E'

When I tried to refresh the dependencies I got a nasty error message. If found this post and played with the suggested settings a bit without any joy. Then I shut-down visual studio and restarted and the build error went away! So if this happens to you all I can suggest is to take a look at this post or restart Visual Studio, or both!

Every software developer’s day to day tasks includes keeping their software development tools up to date and running smoothly, today I got tired of viewing git differences in the raw and decided to hook winmerge up for viewing diffs.

Instructions for setting winmerge up as your Git difftool can be found here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/255202/how-do-i-view-git-diff-output-with-visual-diff-program/949242#949242

I tried to apply these instructions on Windows 7 64bit and had to make 2 changes to get it to work.

Change this command (run in git bash):

to this:

and in winmerge.sh, change this line:

to:

After making these changes differences were shown in winmerge after issuing the difftool command.