About DevCorner

DevCorner is here to deliver development related content from inside TechSmith!
    This will include:
  • Interviews to get to know developers here at TechSmith
  • Source code samples and discussions on it
  • Pretty much anything exciting related to development!

The Camtasia Studio 8 Library: Store Subprojects in the Library for Better Performance

Guest post by Bob Jones, owner of Bob Jones Software The Camtasia Studio Library, first introduced with version 7, is a powerful tool for leveraging my screencasting workflows. In this six part blog series, I will share six different ways I use the Camtasia Studio Library to boost productivity, efficiency, consistency, and more. In this first post, learn how and why I create video subprojects and save them to the Library. Library Overview The Library, located within the Editor, holds Continue reading

DevCorner: Introducing Hyde, TechSmith’s first open source project

Today, TechSmith is excited to release its first open source project called Hyde. We developed the library internally to solve problems we've had interacting with Windows Azure Storage. The code and documentation are on Github, and we are also releasing a NuGet package. What is Hyde? Hyde is an Object to Entity mapper for Windows Azure, it hydrates and dehydrates objects to and from storage. Essentially, it maps a row in table storage to a strongly typed C# object and allows CRUD (create, read, Continue reading

DevCorner: Creating a Kanban Game for learning purposes

Recently, TechSmith hosted a Macomb Community College class. They were interested in learning the Kanban practices used by one of our development units. Being on the committee, I volunteered to develop an activity demonstrating the lifecycle of a Kanban card. If Angry Birds has taught us anything, it's that everyone loves a good game. So I decided to try and make a Kanban game. I think it worked out fairly well, and I'm hopeful it can be used again as a tool to introduce people to Kanban. The Feature I Continue reading

Dev Corner – Decltype Keyword

// The keyword decltype is new in Visual Studio 2010 and is available as well in GCC C++.  It is pretty simple you can get a type out of an expression.  I see it used most in cases where you don't want to supply a typedef but would like to use the type of an existing variable; hopefully this example will help illustrate: struct A { int m_n; }; int main() { A a = {4}; decltype(a.m_n) n = 6; //n in the same as A::m_n which in an int a.m_n = n; return 0; } So with Continue reading

Interview With a Lead Developer: Jim Dusseau

Who are you, and what do you do? Jim Dusseau. I'm a lead developer currently working on Camtasia Relay. I spent the last few months helping out the Coach's Eye team. How did you find out about TechSmith? My manager at my previous company knew I really wanted to develop for the Mac platform. He was a Camtasia Studio user, found out about a mac development position with TechSmith, and let me know about it. What do you like most about working at TechSmith? I think great companies are Continue reading

Dev Corner – Regular Expressions for Improved Productivity

If you're a developer, the term "regular expression" should at least sound familiar.  But, if you've never had to write any code that made use of them (i.e. code in a scripting language), you may not know how to write/use regular expressions. And, if you're like I was, that doesn't bother you. After all, regular expressions can get confusing and complicated very quickly. So, it's probably better to just leave them alone until you need them for some code, right? Sure, maybe. But consider this: Continue reading

Dev Corner – Magic Numbers In Designing

Everyone should know what I mean by Magic Numbers. Those no named numbers in code that live just to make you scratch your head and scream. I know I've come to despise seeing numbers without a variable name. In XAML (and other interface languages) it seems to be easy to forget those simple rules for naming our values and to justify just why you set the margin to 4 vs 7 (Jing's standard margin is 7). It's this reason that I took some time to see how we could improve the readability of numbers in Continue reading