Building a small running bot with Windows 10 on a Raspberry Pi 2

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I won a Raspberry Pi B+ from a Microsoft event, so I took some time to learn about the Pi to understand more about all the fuzz around IoT. The experience I had is very fun and excited. I study and work mainly on software engineering, so hacking the virtual world is much more familiar to me that hacking those hardware and devices in the real world. However, Raspberry Pi turned out to be the perfect device for me to learn more about this IoT area by providing a bridge between high level programming language (such as Python) and all the “complicated” GPIO and I2C stuffs. In other words, you can write Python instead of C++ or Assembly to communicate with so many electrical boards and devices. There are many interesting and easy to follow tutorials on Adafruit that I strongly recommend you to take a look and give it a try.

With the introduction of Windows 10 on Raspberry Pi 2, the small computing box becomes even more interesting to me. The Pi can now run Universal Windows apps and communicate with devices such as Xbox controller. Therefore, I have decided to buy a new Pi 2 and give Windows 10 IoT a try with a new project: a running robot that is remotely controlled with a Xbox Controller.
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Beta8 and the new hosting model

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In ASP.NET6 beta8, Helios (IIS native host) has been removed. Instead you can use Kestrel host and configure IIS server to talk to the host. This hosting model should be very familiar with people using ASP.NET 6 on Linux as they may have already been using this hosting model from previous betas. I won’t write much about the hosting model as Damian Edwards already has a detailed post on that here: https://github.com/aspnet/Announcements/issues/69
However, I will describe some change that everyone that are using Helios on Windows would have to make to their beta7 projects.
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CompositeTransform3D in Windows 10

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I believe this has been mentioned in several blog posts (such as this one), but I missed one important part, and it took me almost an hour to figure out why my CompositeTransform3D does not give a nice 3D effect but only a “scaling” effect.

Turn out I need to have to put a PerspectiveTransform3D in the container of the element with CompositeTransform3D.

How to prepare a HTML email for your web application

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As many of my other posts in this blog, this will be a note-to-self, collecting all the tidbits that I have learned in preparing a HTML email that would show properly (or as expected) in major email clients during the development of my latest application.

Below is a short list of my suggestions.

  • Use <table> and nested <table> instead of <div> for your layout
  • Don’t create table cells with the height of 1px
  • Don’t use <tr> to create top/bottom padding
  • Don’t use <p>
  • Use a <tr> for each paragraph
  • Don’t rely on page level CSS
  • Don’t try to put fancy styles in <a>
  • Be careful when putting URLs in the email content
  • Test as much as possible


There any many excellent articles on the same topic. I will try to collect them here in the future when I have more free time. In the mean time, if you know any good article, or have better solutions than what I have suggested, please feel free to comment below.
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Posting raw JSON string with jQuery

nguyenquyhy

If you are using jQuery’s ajax function to post raw JSON string to your APIs, you might get some problem when your API does not receive the correct content, or in the case of ASP.NET Web API and parameter binding, you may get null input parameters in your controller.

The JavaScript can be as simple as this.

And the post action of the Test API controller be something like below.

The post action will not get “inputparameter” as the value of variable input; instead we get a null value.
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