Codeproject Articles

IOBOT : Build your own Azure powered Robots

2nd Prize winner of Microsoft Azure IoT contest

Building robots from the scratch with speech recognition, remote voice control, learning intelligence with Raspberry PI, Intel Galileo and Microsoft Azure.

It was in my previous article on Internet of Things, I have mentioned that "making robots moving around without hitting each other is not easy". But, wait! Is that really not easy? may be yes or may be not that hard. But why not try building one by our own to see how it works. This article is an attempt to build two small robots which can interact with human as well as within each other. We are going to do almost everything from the scratch. Just imagine the Sonny character from I Robot movie. No, we are not going to do that. But, up to some level where our robot can respond to our commands and learn new commands, communicate with other robot etc., then you can extend this to any level as you wish. Sky is the limit for your imagination.

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Internet of Things: Programming IoT Devices, Web Services and IoT Clients

A complete walk through on IoT Device programming, Web Service programming and IoT Client programming.

Internet of Things – There are many articles to explain about “IoT” out there on the internet, so we are not going deeper into what it is. In a simple term “Internet of Things – Making devices work based on connected data through internet”. The data source can be from a sensor, a web server, another device, a mobile phone or any form of an electronic device which can receive/send data through internet. So “Internet of Devices” + “Internet of Data” = “Internet of Things”. Is it that simple? Yes, it is, as long as you are thinking of clicking a button from your office to switch off your TV at home. But, if you want to build a bunch of devices to act and react to each other based on data it receives from each other like robots moving around without hitting each other, automatic cars moving on roads without any accidents, it is not that simple, isn’t it? Rome was not built in a day. This article is to give you some bricks to start building now.

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MS Office OLE Automation using C++

A simple guide to automate MS Word and MS Excel using C++.

“MS Office Automation using C++” - this is what I started searching over the internet a few weeks back to plot a graph in an Excel sheet through my program. Fortunately, I got a few - actually very few - inputs from the cyber world, might be because I am a poor searcher in the internet. This article is for those who are still searching the internet with the same keywords.

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Changing Windows XP's Bootskin, Windows File Protection, and Themes programmatically

Vistra code walkthrough article, to explain a few of the interesting things about Windows.

Download Vistra Application(Vistra.zip)

When I was searching something over the Internet, I got to see a software which couldn modify Windows XP's bootskin. I was surprised, and started exploring how it can be done by a third party software (not Microsoft's). This is how Vistra development started. This is a Vistra code walkthrough article, to explain a few of the interesting things about Windows. At the end of this article, you will know what is Windows File Protection, how to change Windows XP's bootskin, how to change Windows themes programmatically, and a few more.

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Control within a control & Subclassing with a cool example

A list control displaying directories and files as on typing the path in your Rich Edit control and a subclassed Color256 dialog.

Controls within a control with a cool example – “Do remember, controls are nothing but child windows. They can get all messages that a window can get.” This article will go along with a RichEdit control example. In the example, a rich edit control is subclassed and a list box is used as a child control, i.e., a ListBox within a RichEdit control.

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Keyboard Events Simulation using keybd_event() function

A short description of keybd_event() function for beginners.

Simulation of a keyboard input is a well known concept for those who are all familiar with Visual Basic. SendKeys() in Visual Basic does all the things, if you want to do anything without keyboard. But what is in SendKeys() function? What does it do? Can we do such a thing with Visual C++? This article is the answer. I think this will be useful for beginners who are all just trying to do something different with VC++. Let us get into the steps…

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Irregular shaped buttons – owner drawn buttons made easy

Freehand draw - make a button with irregular shape. A step by step beginner's guide.

Button is the only control where we have to struggle or have to take more effort to change its shape and properties. But, it is not that much difficult to change its properties as it seems. The only tough thing is, we need to know how to draw well. A good artist can make a good-looking button. If you know well to play with “Device Caps” you can do more with button designs, that's all. This article is just about the basics of making your own owner drawn irregular shape buttons.

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