.NET Tips and Tricks from Daily .NET Tips – July and August 2013 Links

Daily .NET Tips is aiming to sharing useful coding tips and tricks for .NET Developers. This site completely design for sharing Tips and Tricks, useful Code Snippet which anyone use in daily development work and targeted anything related with .NET.   In this post I am quickly listing down all the tips shared over the month of July and August 2013.

Kinect for Windows SDK – Tips and Tricks

Developing applications using Kinect for Windows SDK is always fun and interesting. Recently I have shared couple of cool tips and tricks on Kinect for Windows SDK. You may found helpful for your day to day Kinect for Windows SDK based development.

Kinect Status Notifier – Notify Kinect Status in System Tray

The Kinect Status Notifier, will pops up a notification in system tray whenever this changes in sensor status.   This can be very useful for Kinect for windows SDK based application.

To understand the flow of the Kinect status and the scenarios on which it can occur in a simpler way, refer the diagram below. Once the device is plugged in and power is turned off it will goes to “Not Powered” state, similarly for unplugging the device from USB port will returns the “Disconnected” status. If you plugged it in back or turn the power on, first it will in “Initializing” state before turns into “Connected” state.

Presenting at Microsoft User Group Hyderabad – UG Meet – Hyderabad 23rd Feb 2013

Microsoft User Group Hyderabad (MUGH ) invites you to monthly User Group Meet on 23rd Feb’13 . This monthly UG meet scheduled on coming Saturday (23rd Feb  – from  9:00 A.M ) at Infotech Enterprises Ltd, Hyderabad.

I will  be delivering a session on “Kinect for Windows SDK” and will talk about how we can build a gesture enabled and speech recognized application; this is what we called building Natural User Interface (NUI) application. I will also walk you through with different features of Kinect SDK such as capturing Infrared data Stream, Getting Sensor Accelerometer data, tracking human body joints and something around Face Tracking. 

Get the IR Stream and control the IR Emitter – Kinect for Windows SDK

In this post I am going to talk about how to capture the Infrared stream from the Kinect sensor and control the IR emitter using Kinect for Window SDK. This feature is available with the Kinect for Windows SDK v1.6. The major components for a Kinect device consists of a depth sensor, color camera, IR Emitter, and a set of microphones with everything secured inside box. The box is attached to a small motor working as the base that enables the device to be tilted.

Kinect Book : Kinect for Windows SDK Programming Guide

I am very happy and pleased to announce the availability of my book “Kinect for Windows SDK Programming Guide”. The purpose of this coverpage1book is to explain how to develop applications using the Kinect for Windows SDK. If you are a beginner and looking to start developing applications using the Kinect for Windows SDK, and if you want to build motion-sensing , speech-recognizing applications with Kinect, this book is for you.  This book uses C# and WPF in the examples, so you need to know the basics of C# and WPF. If you are a student with basic C# programming knowledge and having basic understanding of WPF and interested to learn about Kinect SDK, you can also read this book.

Quick Overview:

  • Building application using Kinect for Windows SDK.
  • Covers the Kinect for Windows SDK v1.6
  • A practical step-by-step tutorial to make learning easy for a beginner.
  • A detailed discussion of all the APIs involved and the explanations of their usage in detail
  • Procedures for developing motion-sensing applications and also methods used to enable speech recognition

Home Security System Using Kinect, Azure, Windows Phone and Windows 8

Most the people who were in the TechEd 2012 India would have witnessed the cool demo by me and Jebarson made on the opening Keynotes of the event.  And now we would like to share how this solution was developed so that you can also build your own.

Background

Before we could pitch in, let me give a little background on how we decided to build this on our garage. Developer Conference 2011 on Hyderabad was scheduled on October 2011 and myself and Jebarson were looking forward to show something cool on our own interested areas. Jebarson was looking out for something on Windows Azure and Windows Phone while myself was fiddling around Kinect. Ran out of ideas we both met together and thought of integrating everything and that is when we came up with the idea of building our own home security. We started building this application as early as September 2011. And by now, we have already revised the application more than 5 times due to newer SDK release and also due to the addition of newer components.

TechEd India 2012 – Presenting On "Windows Azure With Windows Phone, Windows 8 Metro And Kinect”

I am very happy and excited to announce that this TechEd I will be presenting along with my friend Jebarson. We will be presenting a session which will showcase the integration onWindows Azure, Windows Phone, Windows 8 Metro and Kinect.

imageFor the presentation we have developed a proto solution for Home Security. Well let me explain how we have put all these technologies into action. The Kinect device will serve as a watch dog at the home which is connected to the Azure. The device will be uploading patrol images to the Azure on regular intervals. Once there is a human intrusion detected, the Kinect will send a alert to the Azure and also will start streaming the live video to the Smooth Streaming Server hosted on Azure. Once the Azure, receives the alert, it will send a notification using Microsoft Push Notification Server (MPNS) to the subscribed Windows Phones and Windows 8 Metro apps where you can watch the video streamed live from the Kinect. Well, that’s not the end, we will also demonstrate on controlling Kinect from Windows Phone / Windows 8 Metro app using Azure App Fabric.

We will be discussing all the technologies involved and the architecture of the complete solution extensively along with a live demonstration in the TechEd.

Development With Kinect .NET SDK (Part V) – Developing Application using Multiple Kinect Devices

This is the fifth post in the series of Development With Kinect .NET SDK.  In this post I am going to discuss about interacting with multiple Kinect devices with in a single system using Kinect .NET SDK. Before going forward, I will strongly recommend you to read my previous post where I have discussed about Connecting Multiple Kinect Devices with System  which will help you setup your system with multiple devices.

Development With Kinect .NET SDK (Part IV) – Connecting Multiple Kinect Devices with System

This is the fourth post in the series of Development With Kinect .NET SDK. In few of my previous posts I have covered Setting up Kinect Devices and Getting Started with Kinect Development ( Part I) , Exploring NUI APIs with Camera ( Part II)  and Adjusting Kinect Camera Angle (Part III). Till now whatever I have covered, that comes under dealing with  single  Kinect devices. Let’s have some more fun with multiple Kinect devices.  The Kinect .NET SDK does provide support for multiple Kinect devices.   In this post I am going to discuss how you can configure two devices with your system.

Development With Kinect .NET SDK (Part III) – Adjusting the Kinect Camera Angle

This is the Part III of my Kinect .NET SDK Development series post. In past two posts I have discussed about  Installation of Kinect Devices along with setting up your development environment and Exploring NUI APIs with Camera. In this post I am going to cover some more fundamental stuff of Kinect Camera. Kinect .NET SDK provides some API to interact with motorized tilt ( Check out the device details section of first post for more information )  to enables the camera up (+27 Degree)  or down (-27 degrees) .  To adjust the motorized tilt  you need to  set the NUI Cameras ElevationAngle property to a value between –27 and +27.

Development With Kinect .NET SDK (Part II) – Using NUI APIs with Camera

In my previous post Development With Kinect .NET SDK (Part I) – Installation and Development Environment Setup I discussed about  fundamentals of  Kinect sensors and developing application using Kinect .NET SDK. I also explained different types of API that mainly used for interacting with Kinect Device. Natural User interfaces (NUI) and Audio are the core APIs stack for Kinect sensors and  and in the previous article we starts with NUI APIs. By this time you must know how to get start with of NUI API’s by initializing the runtime. Let’s take a inner look of NUI API. In this post I will discuss about NUI APIs for Kinect .NET SDK and will see how we can interact with Kinect Camera Sensors using it.

Development With Kinect .NET SDK (Part I) – Installation and Development Environment Setup

The Kinect SDK is a developer toolkit for developing applications. This SDK provides a fantastic interface to interact with Kinect programmatically. The Kinect for Windows SDK beta includes drivers that interact with H/W and provides an interface to interact with device, APIs for  interacting with  Camera, Sensors, microphone and Motor. The SDK provides capabilities to the developers who build applications with  C#, VB or C++  with Visual Studio 2010  which is running on Windows 7. I started developing application with Kinect SDK almost 2 months back, from the day when I received my Kinect Device. I tweeted about my first application over here  and I am still learning about the Kinect SDK API’s and how to use them in different ways. Let’s share the learning over here. I will keep posting as step by step to allow you to  understand the API’s and get inside Kinect development. I will write a series of post where I will discuss about fundamentals of Kinect SDK API and developing Application using it and yes Step by Step and obviously with Demo Project