Beatle's Blog

I've got another round of ESP news articles for ya.

Business Week

This one is a little old, from back in December, but if you haven't seen it yet, take a look:

Business Week ESP Article

I particularly like the part about Northrup Grumman using ESP to create a prototype/Proof of Concept on page 2 of the article, since I got to spend a week up in Reston, VA working with this team to pull this off :->  I doubt every Service Provider who uses ESP is going to get a week of my time to help them out, but it was a lot of fun and they were a great group of developers to work with.

Training & Simulation Journal

TSJOnline.com has 2 articles on ESP:

First TSJOnline article - this one mentions Lockheed Martin and FlightSafety have signed up as partners.

Second TSJOnline article - this one is a more general article on Microsoft entering the Visual Sim market.

Games Developer Conference / Serious Games Summit

This next one is an article on Gamasutra about the GDC / SGS last week in San Francisco and the Microsoft ESP presence there - you even get to see a picture of our studio head, Shawn :->

GDC / SGS coverage

Microsoft MSDN

For those of you with a Microsoft MSDN account, you can now download the ISOs for Microsoft ESP for testing purposes from the MSDN Subscriber downloads section.

Microsoft ESP Home Page

Our home page has been updated with a short demo video, click and enjoy :->

That's all for now, till next time

Tim "Beatle" Gregson

I've noticed some folks having problems using SimConnect with WPF based apps because there's no easily accessed hWnd and no easily overridden DefWndProc.  Here's a solution that works around those problems and is also usable in WinForms apps if you like.

In the existing managed samples provided in the SDK, the 2nd param of the new SimConnect(...) line is the hWnd and the 3rd param is the WM_Xxx based message to send to the main window.  For this solution, we will instead pass 0 for both of those params and pass an AutoReset EventWaitHandle object as the 4th param to that call.  Then we will create a background thread that waits for this event to fire and then calls the ReceiveMessage function to handle data received from SimConnect.

Here's a couple of code snippets:

This first snippet shows the data used:

// data

Microsoft.ESP.SimConnect.SimConnect sc;

System.Threading.EventWaitHandle scReady = new System.Threading.EventWaitHandle(false, System.Threading.EventResetMode.AutoReset);

System.Threading.Thread bgThread = null;

public delegate void MyDelegate();

And this next snippet shows the code that uses these data items:

// code

private void ConnectToSimConnect(void)

{

    sc = new Microsoft.ESP.SimConnect.SimConnect("VE_SC_WPF", (IntPtr)0, 0, scReady, 0);

    bgThread = new System.Threading.Thread(new System.Threading.ThreadStart(scMessageThread));

    bgThread.IsBackground = true;

    bgThread.Start();

}

private void scMessageThread()

{

    while (true)

    {

        scReady.WaitOne();

        this.Dispatcher.Invoke(System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherPriority.Normal, new MyDelegate(scMessageProcess));

    }

}

private void scMessageProcess()

{

    sc.ReceiveMessage();

}

With the code above, all of the OnRecvXxx callbacks will still happen on the UI thread context, meaning the rest of your code can stay the same as it was when using the hWnd and WM_Xxx message with an overridden DefWndProc. 

If you would prefer that the message handling and the OnRecvXxx callbacks occur on the background thread context, you can do that with this code snippet instead:

// code

private void ConnectToSimConnect(void)

{

    sc = new Microsoft.ESP.SimConnect.SimConnect("VE_SC_WPF", (IntPtr)0, 0, scReady, 0);

    bgThread = new System.Threading.Thread(new System.Threading.ThreadStart(scMessageThread));

    bgThread.IsBackground = true;

    bgThread.Start();

}

private void scMessageThread()

{

    while (true)

    {

        scReady.WaitOne();

        sc.ReceiveMessage();

    }

}

Doing things this way will require you to handle any thread synchronization that might be required to access any UI elements within each OnRecvXxx callback, but if you aren't accessing UI elements much in your callbacks, then the 2nd way might be more efficient overall, but will require more work on your part to insure things happen on the correct thread.

I've been playing around with WPF for the last couple of weeks and its a lot of fun and can do some really cool things (repeat after me, DataTemplates are your friend :-> ).  Hopefully the above code snippets will let folks out there write some cool WPF based SimConnect clients.

Tim "Beatle" Gregson

We've posted case studies from a couple of our launch partners on the ESP Website.  They are located on the Resources page.

Adacel MaxSim Flight Trainer

The first one, from Adacel, is a .DOC file describing their MaxSim Flight Trainer program.  I'm going to quote the Executive Overview paragraph here, because it really says it all about what ESP is, but do go read the entire Case Study Document.

Adacel wanted to be first to market with an integrated flight and air traffic control (ATC) simulation solution for flight schools not served by multi-million dollar offerings. It created the MaxSim Flight Trainer based on its own speech-driven Air Traffic Control simulation technology and the Microsoft® ESP™ visual simulation platform. Adacel created the integrated solution in just three weeks with a single developer, and produced a rich, immersive flight simulation experience that it estimates would have taken millions of dollars and months of work to create from scratch. The extensive after-market of add-ons for Microsoft ESP helps to ensure that Adacel and its customers can easily extend the simulation. And the low-cost Windows® hardware on which it runs helps to ensure that the MaxSim Flight Trainer is more cost-effective, scalable, and transportable than traditional, proprietary offerings.

Acron Capability Engineering

The second one, from Acron, is a Windows Media Video file produced by Acron describing the ways they are using Microsoft ESP.  Here's a link to some news/press releases from Acron, including information about a couple of support products they will be offering including a 3D modeling program and a HLA interface for Microsoft ESP.

Northrop Grumman

This one isn't on our Resources page, but Northrop Grumman has put out a Press Release announcing they will be using Microsoft ESP as part of their C4ISR Route and Mission planning system.  In fact, I'll be up in Reston, VA all next week, at the Microsoft Technology Center, helping them work on a Proof of Concept for this.

Well, that's all the case studies/press releases I've come across so far, will post again as I find more of these.

Beatle

Several members of the Microsoft ESP team are down in Orlando this week at the I/ITSEC conference.  Anybody interested can check out the I/ITSEC web site, which has the daily conference newspaper, ShowDaily, available as PDF files for each day.  If you take a gander at the Tuesday Nov 27th issue, on page 10, there's a write up about Microsoft ESP.

Beatle