Categories
Uncategorized

Counting Down to Seven: XNA Game Studio 4.0!!!!

Welcome to another installment of Counting Down to Seven, a series of articles about mobile app development that I’m writing as we count down the days to MIX10, when we reveal more about the up-and-coming Windows Phone 7 Series.

Xbox 360 Achievement: "Achievement Unlocked: New Version of XNA!"

"Counting Down to Seven" badge

The Game Developers Conference is a good time to make game development announcements, and that we did: version 4.0 of XNA Game Studio, Microsoft’s framework and toolset for easier game development. Here’s what it means in a nutshell:

  • No matter whether you develop with managed or unmanaged code, it’s what you’ll use for game development on Windows Phone 7.
  • You’ll create better mobile games faster, thanks to a powerful and comprehensive set of tools.
  • Xbox LIVE comes to mobile, meaning that you can take advantage of the Xbox’s popular gaming social network.
  • For those of you already building games with XNA, you’ve got a brand new platform, and it’s one that you take everywhere you go.

Games pages on Windows Phone 7

You’re going to see all sorts of details about XNA Game Studio 4.0 over the next couple of weeks, and here are some of the best places to get them…

Follow the “Seven Samurai”

By “Seven Samurai”, I’m referring to the Windows Phone 7 Series development team:

Check Out These Sites

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
Uncategorized

Counting Down to Seven: Charlie Kindel Demos His Windows Phone 7 Handset to CNET’s Ina Fried

Welcome to another installment of Counting Down to Seven, a series of articles about mobile app development that I’m writing as we count down the days to MIX10, when we reveal more about the up-and-coming Windows Phone 7 Series.

"Counting Down to Seven" badgeIf you’re a developer itching to get started writing apps for Windows Phone 7, you’re going to want to follow Charlie Kindel’s blog and Twitter stream (as well as Yours Truly and this blog, of course). Charlie’s one of the developers on the Windows Phone team, and while he won’t be delivering the first presentation on WP7 at MIX10 (Windows Phone’s VP Program Management Joe Belfiore will do that), he’ll be delivering the first technical presentation later that day.

The video above shows an interview that’s as informal as it gets. It’s a hand-held camera interview featuring CNET’s Ina Fried and Charlie on the Embarcadero in San Francisco, talking about what Windows Phone 7 will be like for developers, with Charlie demonstrating on his Windows Phone 7 prototype. I’d love to get my grubby paws on one of those!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
Uncategorized

Thursday’s “Ignite Your Coding” Webcast: “Composable Applications FTW” with Glenn Block

Ignite Your CodingThis Thursday, my fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe and I will host another live Ignite Your Coding webcast, where we’ll interview another high-profile software developer and pass along some of your questions.

This week’s guest is Glenn Block, a Program Manager for .NET FX at Microsoft. Glenn’s one of the go-to guys on Prism, Unity, MEF and ways of building maintainable and reconfigurable applications out of pieces that you can assemble and rearrange in general. We’ll talk with him about building composite applications, design patterns, the “alphabet soup” of SOLID, DI and IoC and whatever questions you ask him.

blocks.png(We don’t have a photo of Glenn Block, but we do have the image to the right, which is the symbol for MEF – that’s Managed Extensibility Framework – which is one of Glenn’s projects. It’s a lucky coincidence that Glenn’s last name is also featured prominently in the image.)

If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast on Thursday and/or Ask Glenn Questions…

You’ll need:

If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…

We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!

What’s Ignite Your Coding All About, Anyway?

It’s all about helping you, the software developer, find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We got our hands on some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We got some big names from the Microsoft/.NET world, but we also went farther afield and got some people from beyond that world as well, because a different perspective is often helpful.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
Uncategorized

Counting Down to Seven: User Experience with Microsoft User Experience Gurus Bill Buxton and Albert “Windows Phone 7” Shum

Get Microsoft Silverlight
Don’t have Silverlight? Get it here or download the video in
MP4, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune format.

Welcome to another installment of Counting Down to Seven, a series of articles about mobile app development that I’m writing as we count down the days to MIX10, when we reveal more about the up-and-coming Windows Phone 7 Series.

"Counting Down to Seven" badgeWe’re a week away from the start of the MIX10 conference! I like to refer to this as Microsoft’s most “right-brained” gathering, as its target audience and topic isn’t just developers and writing software, but designers, design and user experience.

With designers and design in mind, it’s only fitting that I show you a video featuring Nic Fillingham interviewing a couple of Microsoft User Experience gurus who also hail from Canada:

  • Bill Buxton: He’s a Principal Researcher for Microsoft Research, and before that, he was Chief Scientist at Alias Wavefront and a professor at University of Toronto. And I’m pleased to report that he got his bachelor’s degree – in music – from my alma mater, Crazy Go Nuts University (which some of you may know as Queen’s University). He was the guy who thought of applying Fitts’ Law to human-computer interaction, did some pioneering work with multi-touch interfaces and invented the pie menu (which means that we owe weapon selection in Saints Row 2 and the full combat/spellcasting system in Dragon Age: Origins to him).
  • Albert Shum: He’s the Director of Mobile Experience Design for Windows Phone 7. Albert’s from Winnipeg, studied engineering and architecture at University of Waterloo and went on to do design work at Nike before joining Microsoft. You can watch a video showing him talking about the new Windows Phone 7 experience and the thinking behind it in a previous article of mine, Albert Shum on Windows Phone 7.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
Uncategorized

TWC9: 100th Episode, Featuring VS2010 RC Tips, WPF and Bonus Footage

Get Microsoft Silverlight
Don’t have Silverlight? Get it here or download the video in
MP3, MP4, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune format.

imageThis Week on Channel 9, or TWC9 for short, is a weekly digest show hosted by Microsoft’s Dan Fernandez and Brian Keller covering the developer community news they find most interesting after sifting through hundreds of blogs, videos and announcements. It’s aimed primarily at .NET developers, but if you have any geeky tendencies at all, chances are they’ll cover something that appeals to you!

This week’s episode is their 100th, and in it, they cover:

Topic What it is or why it’s interesting
Second patch for IntelliSense crashes in the Visual Studio 2010 RC The RC is the last public build prior to RTM. It’s pretty rock solid, but users of touch displays, tablet PCs, screen reader software, and potentially some others as well may need these patches.

Enabling Silverlight 4 with the Visual Studio 2010 RC (NOTE: This is an unsupported hack.) The RC of Visual Studio 2010 did not support Silverlight 4. This support is “coming” but no timeline yet. In the meantime, you can try this hack.

Getting Silverlight 3 to build with Team Build 2010 by Martin Hinshelwood If your projects use Silverlight 3 and you use Team Build on a 64-bit server, you’ll need this. But it’s also a good look at debugging a Team Build 2010 workflow.

What’s new in Visual Studio 2010 (ALM | The rest) There is a LOT of new stuff in this release. Blink and you’ll miss something. These documents do a pretty thorough job of documenting the goodness.

Beta of FireFox testing package for Visual Studio 2010 is now available Visual Studio 2010’s testing framework is extensible and will provide support for additional target platforms via add-ins from Microsoft and 3rd parties.

Optimizing Visual Studio 2010 and WPF applications for Remote Desktop via Greg Duncan. The Visual Studio 2010 IDE makes heavy use of WPF. If you RDP into a development workstation, or build applications in WPF, this post is a must-read.

Configuring VS2010 with SourceGear’s diffmerge The diff / merge tool that ships with Visual Studio is fairly dated, but it’s easy to swap in your favorite tool in its place. This one is free, and comes highly recommended.

Expression Studio 3.0 Tutorials from Paolo Barone Free hands-on tutorials featuring Silverlight, DeepZoom, SketchFlow, and more…

Roundup of WPF Documentation Samples Some good stuff in here; Snoop = “Firebug for WPF”, Inkscape = vector graphics editor…

Write code to enter the NASA Pathfinder Innovation Challenge There are dozens of coding competitions out there at any given time, but we thought this one was really cool – you can either build a “mechanical Turk” game or an image recognition application. And c’mon… it’s Mars! That should be reason enough.

Some (not all) MSR TechFest 2010 content is public and online It’s Microsoft Research’s science fair, and they’ve got some pretty cool stuff this year.

Telling the Visual Studio 2010 testing story with Deep Zoom, and SpeakFlow as a new non-linear presentation medium based on Deep Zoom.

It’s an interesting application of Deep Zoom.
After the credits, some 100th episode bonus materials Because you’re just dying to know.

 

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
Uncategorized

My Chair, My Enemy

“Your chair is your enemy,” starts the New York Times article Stand Up While You Read This!

To give you the thesis of the article, here are the next two paragraphs in the article:

It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you.

That, at least, is the conclusion of several recent studies. Indeed, if you consider only healthy people who exercise regularly, those who sit the most during the rest of the day have larger waists and worse profiles of blood pressure and blood sugar than those who sit less. Among people who sit in front of the television for more than three hours each day, those who exercise are as fat as those who don’t: sitting a lot appears to offset some of the benefits of jogging a lot.

There are two reasons that sitting all day is bad for you:

  • Sitting burns so few calories. Even standing in place burns more calories, what with the work your leg muscles do. Since weight gain is a slow, creeping thing, and little things like eating 30 more calories than you burn is enough to lead to 2 – 3 pounds of weight gain a year. 30 calories is a handful of potato chips!
  • Sitting causes your body to do things that are bad for you. When you sit for long periods, your body stops producing lipoprotein lipase, which is important for processing fats, and your metabolism slows down to match the inactivity.

If you’re self-employed, a mobile worker or have an understanding manager, you can take frequent breaks to do something out of your chair. As a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft, I’m a mobile worker and have taken advantage of the arrangement to do things like:

  • When working at the home office, taking the occasional break to run errands on foot or get some quick household chore done.
  • Going to the gym in the middle of the day, when it’s not crowded. An unexpected side-effect: many of my retired neighbours, who are at the gym in the middle of the day, think I’m sort of unemployed ne’er-do-well.
  • Switching venues: I try to work part of the day at the home office, and part of the day elsewhere, either a wifi-equipped cafe or HacklabTO. Many of these venue changes incorporate a bike ride anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes each way.

It’s worked out pretty well so far; since joining Microsoft, I’ve lost about 12 pounds.

But what if you’ve got an urgent project? Those interruptions are deadly to the sort of “flow” you need to get complex tasks done. One answer might be a “stand up” workstation, where the desk is mounted high enough so that you can use it in the standing position. A more extreme solution is the one pictured at the top of this article – yes, that things is real – Steelcase’s “Walkstation”, a workstation with integrated treadmill. Not only do you get some exercise while you work, the more poetic of you can treat it as an in-your-face metaphor for corporate life below the VP level.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Categories
Uncategorized

Counting Down to Seven: The Windows Phone Sessions at MIX10

Explore the software that powers the Windows Phone 7 Series. Free development tools and support for all MIX10 attendees.

"Counting Down to Seven" badgeWelcome to another installment of Counting Down to Seven, a series of articles about mobile app development that I’m writing as we count down the days to MIX10, when we reveal more about the up-and-coming Windows Phone 7 Series.

For the longest time, the sessions listed under “Windows Phone” at the MIX10 conference (taking place in Las Vegas from March 15th through 17th) have had no details – just a “more details coming soon” message. That changed yesterday, and now the sessions have full names and abstracts, which I’ve listed below in chronological order.

Monday

  
Changing Our Game: An Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Series
Joe Belfiore
Monday, March 15th
11:30 a.m.		 Major changes are coming to Windows Phone! This session goes in-depth on the design and features of Windows Phone and gives a comprehensive picture of what’s coming in this exciting new release.

Joey’s note: Joe Belifiore is the VP Windows Phone 7 Program Management and the guy giving Laura Foy a walkthrough of the features in Windows Phone in that first Windows Phone video that got released during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Overview of the Windows Phone 7 Series Application Platform
Charlie Kindel
Monday, March 15th
2:00 p.m.		 The new Windows Phone is coming! Get a high-level overview of the new application platform and a complete picture of the developer story. Learn about the developer tools, the application frameworks, the support for Silverlight, and the support for XNA.

Joey’s note: Charlie isn’t exaggerating in his Twitter profile when he says that the future of application development for Windows Phones is in his hands.

Windows Phone UI and Design Language
Albert Shum
Monday, March 15th
3:30 p.m.		 Windows Phone constitutes a dramatic new user experience paradigm. This session will provide prescriptive guidance, tips, and techniques on how designers & developers can build beautiful, compelling user experiences that are consistent with the built-in Windows Phone 7 Series experiences.

Joey’s note: Albert Shum is Director of Microsoft’s Mobile Experience Design Team. If you want to find out more about him, check out my article Albert Shum on Windows Phone 7.

Tuesday

  
Microsoft Silverlight “Media”: Moving at 60fps
Eric Schmidt
Tuesday, March 16th
11:00 a.m.		 From HD delivery to dynamic advertising models, Silverlight has rapidly become the industry leader for enabling rich, interactive media scenarios. This session will review the media focused technology strategy behind Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework, IIS Media Services, Microsoft Expression and Windows phone. Highlights for this session include: efficient media player development, 3-d rendering, real-time ad injection, leveraging multi-cast, managing large media delivery farms, choosing the right content protection strategy, real time media pipeline monitoring and a drill into what’s new in Silverlight 4. If you are building or want to build video based Silverlight applications this session will provide technical guidance and give you an opportunity to voice your needs about the future of media and Silverlight.

An Introduction to Developing Applications for Microsoft Silverlight
Shawn Oster
Tuesday, March 16th
11:00 a.m.

New to Silverlight? This is the session for you. This session will cover: how to get started building your first application, tooling, extensibility and deployment. We’ll also highlight the capabilities of Microsoft Silverlight on the PC, as well as support for Windows Phone.

Joey’s note: Shawn Oster is a Program Manager at Microsoft who works on Silverlight. One of his current projects in the Silverlight Toolkit, a way to give users new controls, fixes and updates at a rapid pace.

Building Windows Phone Applications with Silverlight, Part 1
Mike Harsh
Tuesday, March 16th
1:30 p.m.		 Together with part 2, these sessions give an overview of the functionality for Silverlight applications that is unique to the Windows Phone application platform. Part 1 will cover new input paradigms including multi-touch, software keyboard, accelerometer and microphone, as well as the APIs to leverage phone applications like email, phone dialer, contact list and more.

Joey’s note: Mike is a Program Manager at Microsoft working on Silverlight.

Unit Testing Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Applications
Jeff Wilcox
Tuesday, March 16th
2:05 p.m.

Learn how to create and maintain Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Series applications using the Silverlight Unit Test Framework. See what tools are available to easily validate controls and application interfaces, add automatic testing to builds, and gain a solid understanding of test principles to deliver great experiences for your clients and customers.

Joey’s note: Jeff is a Senior Software Development Engineer at Microsoft, working on the Silverlight Toolkit. He is the creator of the Silverlight Unit Test Framework.
Building Windows Phone Applications with Silverlight, Part 2
Peter Torr
Tuesday, March 16th
3:00 p.m.

Together with part 1, these sessions give an overview of the functionality for Silverlight applications that is unique to the Windows Phone application platform. Part 2 will cover the new application model, updated control templates, themes, and services available to applications, including new Windows Phone web services.
Windows Phone Application Platform Architecture
Istvan Cseri
Tuesday, March 16th
4:30 p.m.

Windows Phone 7 Series represents a significant change from the past. The entire stack, starting with the operating system, user experience, and the application platform have been engineered to build a new class of phone that users will just love. This session will go under the covers and describe how to think about applications and games from the perspective of user experience, security, packaging, cloud services and performance. Details on the new application model, device capabilities, location, sensors, and other platform capabilities will be covered.
Silverlight Performance on Windows Phone
Seema Ramachandani
Tuesday, March 16th
4:30 p.m.

Learn how to optimize your Silverlight code for Windows Phone. This session will discuss common bottlenecks using the graphics and managed stacks, and will highlight how to optimize startup and reaction time.

Wednesday

  
Development and Debugging Tools for Building XNA Games for Windows Phone
Cullen Waters
Wednesday, March 17th
9:00 a.m.

This session covers tools available to the developer for building XNA games including debugging, emulation, and performance. Special emphasis is placed on best practices for managed code performance and .NET profiling tools you can use to optimize your games for Windows Phone.
Distributing and Monetizing Windows Phone Applications and Games
John Bruno and Todd Biggs
Wednesday, March 17th
10:30 a.m.

Windows Phone Marketplace will revolutionize distribution of Windows Phone applications, games, and content, and is designed to solve the two largest problems of the Windows Phone consumer-focused developer community: distribution and monetization. This session will provide application developers with the insights, tools, and processes necessary to begin distributing and monetizing their applications on the Windows Phone platform.
Building Windows Phone Games
Michael Klucher
Wednesday, March 17th
12:00 p.m.

With the release of Windows Phone, game developers will be able to create amazing content rapidly through the power of Silverlight and the XNA framework. This talk will outline the basic application model of Windows Phone, enumerate Windows Phone core device characteristics, and walk through highlights of Silverlight and XNA Frameworks on the phone.
Building a High Performance 3D Game for Windows Phone
Shawn Hargreaves and Tomas Vykruta
Wednesday, March 17th
1:30 p.m.

This session will detail how to use XNA to develop 3D games for Windows Phone, with a special eye towards the special characteristics of Windows Phone application platform. Special attention will be placed on optimizing high-performance managed code games for the platform, to help you squeeze out every last drop of performance.

Joey’s note: Shawn’s a developer on the XNA team and a character-at-large in the XNA Creators Club forums. Tomas is a Senior Software Development Engineer with Microsoft’s Advanced technology Group and a Senior Xbox Engineer.
Designing and Developing for the Rich Mobile Web
Joe Marini
Wednesday, March 17th
3:00 p.m.

The Mobile Web has been a long time in coming, and now that it’s here, it’s a force that you and your business can’t afford to ignore. What has made all of this possible is the combination of ever-more-powerful devices, fast network connections, and highly capable mobile browsers. In this session, you will learn how to build sites that work well and look great on Windows Phone and across mobile devices. We’ll cover the core mobile Web scenarios, preparing content for mobile, and tips and techniques for debugging and testing your sites.

Joey’s note: I would argue that the mobile web has been around for a couple of years now, but it’s nice to see it done properly on a Microsoft platform at long last.

 

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.