December 2010

I’d like to wish all my readers a safe and fun holiday season! Whether you celebrate Christmas, Chanukah, Festivus or anything else, have a fun one, enjoy the downtime, be safe, go work on your favourite side project (even if it’s doing nothing at all) and take a peek here every now and again — you never know what I might sneak in here over the break.

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If things get a little too quiet and boring during the holiday downtime and you’re looking for a game, try Pirates Love Daisies. It’s a “tower defense” style game with cute graphics, great sound and very addictive gameplay, and you can play it in a browser that supports the HTML5/CSS/JavaScript troika (often just referred to as the catch-all “HTML5”), which includes the current beta of Internet Explorer 9. In the game, you set up pirates with different combat skills (pistols, swords, cannons and sponges) in strategic locations to defend your patch of daisies from rates, seagulls, crabs, octopi and their boss, the kraken.

If you’re running Internet Explorer 9 or a very fast computer (like my assigned “Dellasaurus” Precision M6500 – a quad-core I7 machine with 16GB of RAM and a 1GB graphics card), try checking the Enable additional effects for IE9 checkbox – it’ll turn on some additional graphic effects in the game, such as clouds and shadows. They’re not necessary for gameplay, but they do spice it up, and you’re going to need a browser that makes use of the GPU (such as IE9) or serious hardware if you want these effects without bogging down the game.

Here’s Larry Larsen talking about Pirates Love Daisies on Channel 9:

Can’t see the video? You can get Silverlight or download it in the following formats: high-quality WMV, high-quality MP4, regular-quality WMV, regular quality MP4 or MP3 (audio only).

Pirates Love Daisies was the first HTML5 project by Grant Skinner, a Flash developer, and was commissioned by Microsoft, who asked him to build a “best-of-breed” tower defense game using HTML5. He talks about his experience on his blog, which includes this opinion on IE9:

I never thought I’d say this, but Internet Explorer 9 actually looks to be a great browser. It has impressive performance, and seems to be very standards compliant. I would definitely recommend checking it out, you might be surprised.

Microsoft Tech Evangelist Giorgio Sardo also blogged about Pirates Love Daisies. In his post titled Pirates Love Daisies: Lessons Learned, he talks about performance and some things they learned about HTML5 game development along the way, including working with the canvas element, fonts, audio and IE9’s developer tools.

Pirates Love Daisies makes use of the Easel JavaScript library, which “provides a full, hierarchical display list, a core interaction model, and helper classes to make working with Canvas much easier.” Although it’s still in early alpha, it works well enough for Pirates Love Daisies, which uses it to manage and render the game screen.

And finally, where does Pirates Love Daisies live? In the cloud! It’s hosted on Windows Azure as proof that Azure’s not just for line-of-business-y, ecommerce-y web applications (although it works quite well for them).

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Comic Sans is probably one of the most misused fonts out there. Originally intended for the comic book-style speech bubbles for “Clippy” and other assistants in Microsoft Office, it got used first for “fun”, “childlike” documents and signs, and then found its way into far less appropriate venues, including those shown in the photos below:

The Comic Sans Criminal site does a great job telling the story of Comic Sans, where people went terribly, terribly wrong with it, what the appropriate uses for Comic Sans are, and it ends with the Comic Sans Pledge:

Check out Comic Sans Criminal! It’s a beautifully-designed site that makes use of some good HTML5 tricks to turn it into an entertaining and gorgeous slideshow, and if it stops you from using Comic Sans inappropriately (or even better, altogether), so much the better!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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This book’s so new that I’m not sure the dead-tree version is available yet: it’s Windows Phone 7 Game Development, published by Apress and written by Adam Dawes. I’ve just purchased the ebook version (which you can download right away for USD$34.99), so I’ve only had a chance to do a quick skim.

According to Apress’ site, here’s what you’ll learn from Windows Phone 7 Game Development:

• How to get started with Windows Phone 7 development, from setting up the IDE to debugging techniques.
• Develop using the free or full versions of Visual Studio 2010.
• Master high performance 2D and 3D graphics using the XNA development environment.
• Build 2D games using Silverlight and also learn how to publish them to the web.
• Find out the best ways to control your games, including using touch screens, keyboards and accelerometers.
• Produce high quality music and sound effects from your games.
• Masses of example code and working projects, including two example games, "Cosmic Rocks" and "Diamond Lines."
• All you need to release your games to the world for fun or to sell.

It looks like a worthy partner to Beginning Windows Phone 7 Development.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Creative Commons photo by Christopher Sessums. Click to see the original.

There’s no time like holiday downtime to go noodle with technologies you’ve been meaning to try out. Sometimes it’s nice to have a break from all the parties, family gatherings and the madness and crowds of Boxing-Day-and-beyond shopping. At the same time, I’m not a fan of completely vegging out in front of the TV. My own downtime plans – asides from catching up on some reading (I’m currently digging the the Oishinbo series of cooking manga) and playing the new Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty – include doing some noodling with Azure.

On the whole, Azure is pretty simple to use. As far as coding is concerned, there really aren’t too many differences between having your application run on Azure and having it run on a regular server. Naturally, setup and deployment are a little different, and the Azure team have worked hard on making it as simple as possible, and the latest Azure portal UI is the result. Still, it’s a new technology and new turf for a lot of people, and it’s easy to get lost.

If you’re working with Azure and find yourself “lost in the cloud”, we can help! Are you stuck at some point in the deployment process? Having trouble setting up a SQL Azure database? Don’t know where to start? We can help – email us at cdnazure@microsoft.com and we’ll help you get up and running!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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I’ve been flipping through Apress’ new book, Beginning Windows Phone 7 Development, and I’ve been impressed so far. As with most books on developing for any given platform, the first couple of chapters are introductory and have the mandatory “Get the Tools” and “Let’s Write a Hello World Program” sections, but the book veers from the standard trajectory in chapter 3 by diving right into the use of the cloud for data storage for your app.

That’s where we get into the serious stuff: the MVVM design pattern, setting up a SQL Azure account and database, creating a cloud service to access that cloud database, building a WCF service to access the data, and then building a Windows Phone app – a notepad application – that accesses that database. By the end of the chapter – and remember, this is chapter three and less than a hundred pages in – you’ve got a cloud-enabled phone app that you can use as the basis for your own. That’s no small feat, and it’s a testament to the tools and technologies available to Windows Phone 7 developers.

Update (Friday, Dec. 17, 2010): Author Henry Lee let us know in the comments that there’s an update to chapter 3 to cover recent changes to Azure’s UI.

I’m still working my way through Beginning Windows Phone 7 Development, but from what I’ve seen so far and from casual scans ahead, I would recommend it for the developer who’s comfortable with C# and .NET and is ready to pick up a lot of new things quickly.

If you’d like to get this book as quickly as possible, I’d recommend the ebook version. It’s also the cheapest, at USD$27.99. Better still, if you buy before midnight of December 31st, you can save 25% by using the promotional code APRESSHOLIDAY2010, knocking the price down to a mere USD$21 (which as of this writing, is a Rush-inspired CDN$21.12).

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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