Jon Skeet

I just received my copy of C# In Depth by Jon Skeet. Jon has a great deal of knowledge on C# and if you’ve never ran into his blog I suggest you check it out here. I’ll post later more about the book but I’m pretty sure it’s a good one.

http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/csharp/

Colors and Hex

I recently needed to write out Color(s) as an xml attribute. I wrote 2 methods to read and write the Color(s) as Hex strings. Here ya go:

namespace Snow.Xna.Graphics
{
public static class ColorHelper
{
private static char[] _hexDigits = {‘0′, ‘1′, ‘2′, ‘3′, ‘4′, ‘5′, ‘6′, ‘7′, ‘8′, ‘9′, ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’, ‘E’, ‘F’};

public static string ToHexString(Color color)
{
byte[] bytes = new byte[4];

bytes[0] = color.A;
bytes[1] = color.R;
bytes[2] = color.G;
bytes[3] = color.B;

char[] chars = new char[8];

for(int i = 0; i < 4; i++)
{
int b = bytes[i];
chars[i * 2] = _hexDigits[b >> 4];
chars[i * 2 + 1] = _hexDigits[b & 0xF];
}

return new string(chars);
}

private static byte HexDigitToByte(char c)
{
switch(c)
{
case ‘0′: return (byte)0;
case ‘1′: return (byte)1;
case ‘2′: return (byte)2;
case ‘3′: return (byte)3;
case ‘4′: return (byte)4;
case ‘5′: return (byte)5;
case ‘6′: return (byte)6;
case ‘7′: return (byte)7;
case ‘8′: return (byte)8;
case ‘9′: return (byte)9;
case ‘A’: return (byte)10;
case ‘B’: return (byte)11;
case ‘C’: return (byte)12;
case ‘D’: return (byte)13;
case ‘E’: return (byte)14;
case ‘F’: return (byte)15;
}

return (byte)0;
}

public static Color FromHexString(string hex)
{
if( hex.Length != 8 )
return Color.Black;

int a = (HexDigitToByte(hex[0]) << 4) + HexDigitToByte(hex[1]);
int r = (HexDigitToByte(hex[2]) << 4) + HexDigitToByte(hex[3]);
int g = (HexDigitToByte(hex[4]) << 4) + HexDigitToByte(hex[5]);
int b = (HexDigitToByte(hex[6]) << 4) + HexDigitToByte(hex[7]);

return new Color((byte)r, (byte)g, (byte)b, (byte)a);
}
}
}

XNExtensions

Nick Gravelyn has released an open source set of C# extension methods for use with Xna. See the post here for more information.

http://www.nickontech.com/2008/12/new-open-source-project-time/