Intelligent Mirror !

An Intelligent Mirror also produced by Living Tomorrow to show an idea for a home of future. It can measure your blood pressure, heart rate - measured by the handle of tooth-brush, remind you to have your medicine etc can be a very helpful gadget for those who want to monitor their health.

Smart Board By Living Tomorrow !

Living Tomorrow along with Microsoft(r) has developed a 'Smart Board' a big touch Screen with a range of different purpose application to be used at home. This version is basically made for you to be used in kitchen you can keep track of your stock by just scanning your purchased product through RFID. It has also an application which can be used to test carbon percentage your house is producing at a specified time.

Future is Here !

Microsoft(r) research team from Cambridge on fourth innovation Day held by Microsoft(r) showed a game in which the car drives itself and hopefully to test the same technology on a real vehicle. The green laser lines measure the time to impact to objects and other show the different routes by the car to pick a prefect line.

Accessing Controls !

You might have had some problem in the past in accessing the controls on the Main form, where you want to set properties of controls on your Main form if you are thinking to instantiate the object of Main class and then setting properties of controls then you are thinking wrong because by following this way you are actually creating a new instance of the form and not accessing the instance which is already in Memory. So, in order to solve this problem the following trick will do the work for you.

In your form2 declare a Class level variable of form type e.g.

Dim oForm as Form

now in the Load event of form2 just make this equal to the 'ActiveForm' property of 'Form1' e.g.

oForm = Form1.ActiveForm

Now just enter the following code in the Button Click event handler or in whatever event you want to use in order to add items to the Listbox or whatever you want to do with the control on the form e.g.

Private Sub btnOK_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, _
                        ByVal e As System.EventArgs) _
                        Handles btnOK.Click

  CType(oForm, Form1).ListBox1.Items.Add(Me.TextBox1.Text)
  'Like this you can now access any control on the Form
  'Who's instance is already in memory.
    
End Sub

I hope this will help you !

Trace Your Code Effectively !

Here is quick and nice trick to trace your code and append the values in the Textbox. For this we have to design a class which inherits from 'TraceListener' Class then we must override the 'Write' and 'WriteLine' method to give it our own logic. So, here it is:

Public Class TraceLogSupport
......Inherits TraceListener

......Private _Targettextbox As RichTextBox
......Private _Targetfrm As Form

......Public Sub New()
............MyBase.New()
............'default constructor
......End Sub

......Public Sub New(ByVal txtbox As RichTextBox, ByVal frm As Form)
............MyBase.New()

......If txtbox IsNot Nothing Then

............_Targettextbox = txtbox

......Else

............MyBase.Dispose()
............Throw New ArgumentNullException("Must specify which Textbox to append text to.")

......End If

......_Targetfrm = frm

......End Sub

......Delegate Sub SetTextCallBack(ByVal text As String)

......Public Overloads Overrides Sub Write(ByVal message As String)
............SetText(message)
......End Sub

......Public Overloads Overrides Sub WriteLine(ByVal message As String)
............SetText(message + Environment.NewLine)
......End Sub

......'Just to make it thread safe.
......Sub SetText(ByVal txt As String)
............If Me._Targettextbox.InvokeRequired Then
..................Dim stcallback As New SetTextCallBack(AddressOf SetText)
.................._Targetfrm.Invoke(stcallback, New Object() {txt})
......Else
..................Me._Targettextbox.AppendText(txt)
......End If

......End Sub

End Class

Now just instantiate the object of this class and add it to Trace's or Debug's listener's collection (Both share the same Listener's collection). Trace and Debug classes can be accessed from anywhere in your code in this way you can easily display the result of your code execution. This is just to make your execution live !

Ale - Latest in Technology !

FuelVapor Technologies has produced a car called 'ale' that can run on vapors rather than on liquid fuel. But it isn't only designed for fuel effeciency but also for performance and according to the company this can pick up speed from 0 to 60 mph in just 5 seconds !

Micro-Robotic Hex Bugs !

Robots can also be toys. The micro-robotic Hex Bugs from Bandai will react to sound and change direction when you clap at them.

Credit: Bandai/AudioCubes

ASIMO !

Honda's ASIMO (Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility) robot can run 4 miles per hour, according to Honda.

Robots in Action !

Like something out of a movie, the Quattro s650 robot from Adept is an "intelligent" vision-guided multi-arm robot that can be used in place of a person in a factory or assembly line. The robot, which the company says can operate at a very fast speed with accurate precision, has four arms that each rotate on a multiple-axis. The entire base can also rotate, making the robot ideal for manufacturing, assembling, packaging, and even putting together kits of items.

10 Quick Tips for VB Developers !

Generics. The Generics class in .NET 2.0 gives developers the flexibility to write methods once and let the .NET Framework handle type issues. There is no boxing of objects or casting of exceptions, which improves performance, and compile errors show up earlier in the coding process.

Debugger ToolTips. Debugging in Visual Basic 2003 was "pretty vanilla," as developers had to go to the Watch window to find it and it didn't say much. In VB 2005, users can expand the box, to see the properties of a particular type, or hold down Ctrl to male the box transparent.

Edit and Continue. Speaking of debugging, this feature lets developers edit code while they're debugging it. "You don't have to keep stop-starting all the time. That can be a very laborious process".

The My namespace. Along with giving developers a place to find and store "the stuff you're going to do 90% of the time," the My namespace lets developers do things like retrieve information with a single line of code -- My.Computer.FileSystem.ReadAllText(filename.txt) --

Templates. These are stored as zip files containing an XML file, a VB file set to transport, a designer file and all other files related to the template. To add a template, just go to "Add New Item" and the appropriate file from the template will appear there.

Snap lines. This graphical form-building tool, likely familiar to designers, gives developers granular control, such as alignment to the top left of a form or to existing controls.

Application settings. With this feature, a developer can name a pointer variable, indicating the location of a stored form. Thus the values of a property, set up once, can be used in many places.

Renaming. By right-clicking on a code identifier like a class name, field or type, a developer can rename it and update all calls and references to that identifier.

Refactoring. This functionality is not available from Microsoft, but third-party vendors like Developer Express.

Snippets. Visual Basic 2005 comes with 500 pre-installed code snippets, categorized by task. They are accessible by right-clicking, by the keyboard shortcut "Tab+?" or by typing the individual snippet's shortcut. Developers can also create snippets for the custom code they use regularly.

Wicked Lasers

Wicked Lasers provides the world's most powerful hand held laser. Check it out you'll be amazed!

Site: http://www.wickedlasers.com/

near-field-communication technology !

O2 have partnered up with Nokia to offer a handset with near-field-communication technology. The NFC chip talks to a nearby reader and credit is then deducted from the phone. Japanese are using this technology already !

Learn More about this technology...