Fun with Visual Studio 2010 Tech Days in London

Which door would you choose?

Went down to London today to give a session as part of tech-days Visual Studio Developer Days. It was great fun, even though just about everything broke at some point during the talk. Richard from Black Marble was on before me and did a very impressive talk about the new testing features in Team Foundation Server.

Doesn’t Richard look like Bill Gates?

When my turn came my laptop had gone to sleep and forgotten to produce any video output. Then I had all kinds of finger trouble typing in programs and my microphone broke and fell off twice. But it was all good…

A blurry version of me, which is how I felt at the time…

Some of the audience, all of whom were absolutely great.

The whole thing took place in a cinema, so I had the biggest screen I’ve ever used in my life.  You can find the presentation here and the demo code here.

As part of the day I was interviewed for Underbelly, a new Microsoft website for developers. you can find my interview here. If you really want to…

Geek Night Files

My name in lights…

After the fun and games of Geek Night I’ve now put all the source files and the presentation up.

• You can find the presentation here.
• You can find all the sample code here.

There are also some more audience pictures on Flickr. Click on the picture above to find your way to my photostream and take a look. I’m off to find a tram, a train and a plane now…

World’s First Windows Phone Controlled Robot

Oscar, my tiny Micro Framework powered robot has become the other first robot to be controlled by a Windows Phone. Charlie Kindel was kind enough to take part in my demo and give the robot commands during the talk. Thanks for that.

I nearly didn’t make it work though, loading the wrong firmware into a device is never going to end well, but in the end all the components fitted together and a happy ending ensued. I’ll have more pictures, and the slide deck that explains how it all works, along with demo code, tomorrow.

This was the setup, you can see Oscar next to my laptop, the Micro Framework board I used as a web host is on the far left.  I also had my own router and WIFI access point so that I could get the phone onto my own private internet…

Update on 2010-04-01 08:53 by Rob

Clint tells me that this is not in fact the first Windows Phone controlled robot. I've ammended the title of the slide accordingly. You can find out about the other one here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2010/03/16/9979874.aspx

Also, because of problems with the updating of my original post I've had to delete it and make a new one, so some comments have been lost. Thanks for them though.

Platform 2010 Free Games Conference at Hull

I’m going to be doing quite a lot of speaking in the next month or so. Good thing I know lots of jokes.……

Anyhoo, in a couple of weeks or so, on March 25th, I’ll be treading the boards at Platform 2010, which is a digital gaming event in Hull. It is at the spiffy new Hull Truck theatre and they have some really good speakers lined up. And me.

It is free to attend, so if you are in the neighbourhood and want to take part you should head over to here and register your interest via the “Contact Us” link.

http://www.platform2010.co.uk/index.html

Geek Night Fun and Games

This is a still from a very embarrassing video:

http://www.devdays.nl/Video.aspx?pid=75

I’m doing it again. Geek Night at Dev Days. This time I’m taking my little robot Jason and a bag full of sensors and bits and pieces. We are going to create some embedded devices on the fly and have some good old .NET Micro Framework fun and games. If you are coming to Dev Days 2010 at the end of March, then it would be great to see you. You can find out more here:

http://www.devdays.nl/GeekNight.aspx

De Nutty Professor Rob Miles

I'm going to be presenting at DevDays09 in Holland later this year (28/29 of May to be precise).

I'm doing two sessions during the conference, one on the .NET Micro Framework and another on XNA. I'm also doing a session at Geek Night. I did one last year, and it was great. This time I'm talking about "Ruling the World with the .NET Micro Framework". I'm going to show how you can achieve greatness by programming tiny devices. It is going to be fun, on the site at the moment they refer to me as "Rob Miles, de nutty professor uit Hull". Works for me.