XNA for Windows 8 Metro

One of the sad things about the move to the new Windows 8 Metro platform is the way that XNA seems to have been left by the wayside, with no way forward for the platform and no workable alternative from Microsoft. I see this as a bit of an own goal really, just when people like Sony are releasing a suite that makes it easy for C# developers to create and deploy applications, and when Microsoft are looking for a way to get developers on board with the Windows 8 way of doing things, they seem to have pulled the plug on the best way to do this.

However, it is not all bad news. The people at MonoGame are beavering away on a solution that will let you leverage your XNA experience and make games for Windows 8 Metro. Following the instructions in this blog post I managed to get a screen full of Cornflower Blue on my Windows 8 system. The familiar Update and Draw methods are present and correct, along with all the XNA types that you know and love. At the moment getting content (fonts, textures and sounds) into your game is a bit of a faff, in that you have to make a Visual Studio 2010 project and use that to prepare the content for use in your Metro program. Having said that, it does work and, thanks to the dedication of the Mono team it looks like we will have an XNA trajectory on Windows 8 Metro. It is just a shame that it is not coming from Microsoft.

Windows 7 Pin To Task Bar Trick

I like pinning things to my Windows 7 task bar (well, everyone needs a hobby I suppose). It provides quick access to the programs that I use most often. However, I found a snag with doing this, which was that it was hard to start a second copy of the program pinned on the task bar. If you press the icon on the task bar once the program is running you get sent to the open program, it doesn’t start another one.

Then, by mistake I found the answer today. If you right click on the icon in the task bar you get a menu the option to run another copy of the program. Very useful.

Microsoft Surface for Windows 8: Something else to want

I love my iPad. But I don’t find it useful as such. It is great for playing games or consuming data, and should I ever feel the need to paint a portrait or compose some music it might prove useful I suppose. But I like to spend my time creating programs and documents and stuff like that, which the iPad just won’t let me do. But the new Microsoft Surface should.

At the moment I’m loving my Samsung Series 7 Slate, which gets pretty close to the larger of the two new Surface devices. I’ve got my slate running Windows 8 Release Preview and it is a properly useful device. In fact at the moment it is my main computer. I’ve got two docking stations, one at home and one at work, and I now carry my desktop around with me. The machine has more than enough power to do what I want, which is use Office, Visual Studio, Photoshop, play a bit of media and browse the interwebs. It is a bit restricted in terms of built in storage, but I’ve got around 20G free at the moment and a 32G SD card plugged in the side which has got a whole bunch of movies and other stuff on there. Battery life is fine too, with at least 5 hours if I work the machine hard, and up to 8 if I take it a bit easier.

The Surface should be rather like this, but better. It has a case that turns into a touch keyboard, and another that turns into a keyboard with moving keys. It also has a kickstand to make it easy to stand on the desk. The two words that come to mind for me are “want” and “one”. The only snag with the Surface is that it isn’t in the shops yet. But when it is, I’ll be there, queuing up for a blue one.

Windows 8 Camp at Hull

On June the 6th we are having a Windows 8 Camp at Hull. The aim is to get students building Windows 8 applications and to help this along Microsoft are going to come up to see us and get things started. If anyone at Hull fancies getting involved then they can sign up for here:

http://hullwindows8.eventbrite.com/

The format will be the same as the Windows Phone Camp earlier this year, and there will be pizza…

Along with the event Microsoft will also be selecting applications and games produced by students to be fast-tracked into the Windows 8 Marketplace. Places for this are strictly limited and each proposal will be assessed individually. If you want to get involved with this, step one is to join the Windows 8 developers Linkedin Group for UK developers http://linkd.in/ukw8apps. If you are a student and you aren’t on Linkedin you should be. Once you have signed up and joined the group you can start putting together ideas for a Windows 8 program to pitch.

Samsung Series 7 Slate Rocks

I blame Black Marble. A week or so ago Robert (Boss) Hogg and Steve Spencer from the company came over to see us and give a presentation on professional software development. Very good it was too. As we were chatting at the end of the session the conversation turned to tablets. I mentioned the Samsung Series 7 Slate that I fancied and Boss said “Oh, we have a few of those. Found a very good price on the internets and Samsung are doing a “VAT back” offer that makes them even cheaper”.

And that was me sold. I had to sell some cameras and lenses to get there, but for a price slightly higher than a fully loaded iPad I’ve now got a really proper portable tablet. It has an i5 processor and 4G of ram, which makes it the second fastest machine I own. The only slight snag is that it has a small-ish 64G internal SSD, but since I’ve been using Live Mesh and Dropbox to store my data I’m used to making do with carrying fairly small amounts of data around with me. At the moment I’ve got pretty much all the software I need loaded up along with data and I’ve still got over 20G left. If I want to take some movies with me I can put them onto a micro SD card and pop them in the slot on the top. I can also be very confident it will play anything without conversion because at the end of the day its a PC.

One standout feature is the Wacom pen support. There is multi-touch of course, but I can also write on the screen surface with a digitiser pen. I can’t really put into words how good this is. The OneNote program, which I’ve always liked but never had the right platform for, suddenly comes alive. I can convert my dodgy handwriting into text and search it, and put my documents into Skydrive for instant sharing. Taking notes in meetings will never be the same.

The tablet also comes with a docking station which gives me HDMI video out and a second USB port (could really do with more). I’ve got at least four hours of use out of my first charge of the battery.

Last night I put Windows 8 on it, following the instructions on the Samsung Windows 8 Preview site. The only really scary bit was deleting every partition on the disk so that I could get the installer to complete, but after that everything went well. And it just works.

I love my iPad, but I hate using it to create anything larger than an email. The Samsung gives me a touchy interface that makes it easy to consume data, plus raw power and a productive environment and all my familiar tools. And a fantastic pen based interface. This and Photoshop would be awesome.

This machine has even replaced the twisty tablet in my affections. I reckon this is a little slice of the future and when Windows 8 launches and these become the norm there is going to be a second wave of tablets coming along, but these will be properly useful.

One note of mild warning: There has been a bit of kerfuffle about problems with the screen glass coming away from the bezel. Some people have had problems with this, particularly with early versions of the hardware. Mine doesn’t look like it is prone to this and the rate of reports of the problem are dying down a bit at the moment. It is hard to make things this small and slim without there being some manufacturing issues. I remember that my first iPhone 3g wasn’t exactly well stuck together, with an overlap on one edge that made the sides not quite flat, but it worked fine for the time that I had it. However, if you are buying one second hand I’d advise that you take a careful look at what you are getting.

My iPad Beater

A while back I got myself a Packard Bell Butterfly Touch laptop. It reminded me a bit of the Toshiba M200 I used to know and love, with a twisty screen that made it into a tablet or a notebook. I quite liked the machine and found it much more useful to carry round than any device whose name begins with i. A few weeks ago I popped a solid state drive in it (you can get the OCZ Agility 3 120G drives for less than 100 pounds now – excellent value) and loaded it up with Windows 8. Result = happiness. I’m in the process of getting used to Windows 8 (I keep starting up Internet Explorer rather than the Start button) but what I’ve got now is a really useful device with a battery that seems to go on for ever.

I took this machine to Singapore and, although it is a teensy bit underpowered to run Kinect programs, it did everything else I asked of it with aplomb. I did quite literally a whole day’s work at Schipol airport using the device. I really can get 10 hours of useful battery life out of it.  And it can boot faster than my iPad.

Windows 8 on the touch screen works very well, it seems to support the swiping gestures very well, and the fact that I can open it up and start typing into Word, or PowerPoint, or Visual Studio, is just wonderful. I even wrote my first Windows 8 application on the device while I was at the airport, along with my sessions for CampFire.

There are not many “twisty top” laptops out there at the moment, perhaps this will change when Windows 8 gets going. And while I was at CampFire I got a look at Shane’s really nice Samsung Series 7 Slate. But for now this is my weapon of choice for carrying around and doing stuff.

Windows Phone 7.1.1 Update

This has nothing to do with Windows Phone. It is the charming bird that wakes us up every morning by singing loudly at around 5:00am and then goes back to sleep. Which is more than we do…

If you are a Windows Phone developer you should install the Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 upgrade. This has been out a couple of weeks or so (and I really should have mentioned it earlier). It has some bug fixes, lets you target the new versions of the Windows Phone platform and, perhaps most importantly, it runs under Windows 8. I’m using it on my little portable machine for demos and stuff and it works a treat.

Home to Windows 8

Got home to Hull this morning at 11:00 am. As I had rather cleverly (if getting up at 4:00 am for three days counts as clever) kept my body clock on UK time while I was away, I wasn’t suffering too much from jetlag, although I was suffering a bit from lack of sleep.

Anyhoo, I was wide awake enough to download the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and install it on my Acer Iconia W500 tablet. I’d put the Developer Preview on the device earlier, and I thought it might work well. It does. I’ve got me a snappy Windows tablet that works a treat. If you’ve got one of these devices and want some Windows 8 goodness you can find a useful howto here. This was written for the Developer Preview of Windows 8 but it works fine with the latest version too.

Windows 8 itself is interesting. It really is a system of two halves. The Metro powered Start Menu gives you Live Tiles and a very finger friendly environment. The desktop gives you a, well, desktop that looks and behaves pretty much like being at home, although it is noticeably quicker than previous versions of Windows. Startup and shutdown times have shrunk dramatically  too.

The Acer running Windows 8 is a reasonable iPad substitute. It even has a Marketplace where you can download and install applications, including a free copy of “Cut the Rope” which is a really good game. And of course I can plug in a keyboard and a mouse and then fire up Visual Studio to do some proper development.

I’m looking forward to seeing Windows 8 running on “pure” slates/tablets which are based on ARM technology. With built in Live Mesh integration you should be able to move between different platforms really easily, using the iPad like devices to consume information and the Windows Desktop behaviours to produce it.

Actually, for me one of the best things about the Windows 8 Consumer Preview is the version of Pinball FX which is shipped with it. This is a very good implementation of the game and it runs really well, even on my little Acer.

Windows 8 on the Acer Iconia Tab

Spent some more quality time with Windows 8 this evening. I’m still a bit confused by the user interface (I keep wanting the Start button to show me my Programs menu), but I am impressed by the way that it just seems to work.

I put Windows 8 on the machine last week and I don’t regret the move. I made a DVD from the ISO image and installed the 64 bit version of the operating system. Since then I’ve been fiddling around with the platform and it works fine for me, the touch side of the experience is especially impressive. I’ve even had some updates install themselves and this evening I added the Bluetooth drivers from the Acer site. They are supposed to be for the 32 bit version of Windows 7, but 64 bit versions are in the file you can download from the Acer product support site.

I’ve now got a working keyboard and mouse and the system might even become useful in the future. I can’t track down 64 bit versions of the accelerometer drivers and the display seems curiously unhappy to flip to portrait mode but apart from that the machine seems quite useable.

I’ve installed Windows Live Essentials (the install went off and fetched .NET 3.5 half way through) and I’m now typing this blog post on the tablet using Live Writer. The only snag really is that I’m down to only around 9G free on the 32G hard disk, but I can plug in a 32G SD card if I want to store some more stuff. Then again, Live Writer has crashed a few times so I don’t think Windows 8 would be a good place to spend real life.

However, if you are looking for a way to get a tablet with Windows 8 I can recommend the device. I can fire up Visual Studio 2011and have a go at writing programs, but it is a bit slow. I didn’t spend much time in Windows 7 after I got the machine but I think it would even make a reasonable portable Windows platform.

Windows Phone vs Windows 8

I’ve been playing some more with Windows 8 and reading a bit about how it works. Very interesting. The thing that I find most surprising though is how unsurprising a lot of it is to me. I think this is because I’ve been deeply into Windows Phone development for the last 18 months or so. The Metro user interface and the use of XAML to design the front end are just how I think about doing things, based on my Windows Phone experience.

The underpinnings of the operating system, with this new Windows runtime are the really fascinating parts, but if you just want to write Windows 8 applications using C# and .NET you could do a lot worse than get hold of the Windows Phone SDK and have a play. My guess is that when the Windows 8 Marketplace opens up it will have a very similar way of working to the Phone one too, so you would also be able to get experience in how to publish programs.

I thought at the time of the Windows 8 keynotes “We are all Windows Phone developers now”, and I reckon this is definitely the way things are going to go.

Ten More things I’ve Learned about Windows 8

Having spent a bit more time on Windows 8 I now know 10 more things:

1. It runs fine on an Acer Iconia Tab W500. Note that I did not discover this by rushing out and buying one in a fit of pique after realising I should have tried harder to get to Build and obtain one of the lovely Samsung prototypes they were giving away. Definitely not.
2. If you do happen to have an Acer tablet, you need to boot from the distribution DVD to wipe the machine and install the 64bit version of Windows 8 on it. This is because for some reason the Acer is shipped with the 32bit version of Windows 7. The 64 bit version is the one you really want to use, because that is the only one that comes with the SDK. And when you do this you find that you only have 1.5G of main memory, because the system (presumably the graphics display) has stolen half a gig. Not that I’ve had memory problems yet.
3. You can install the 64 bit version of Office 10 on Windows 8, but only after you have uninstalled a 32bit version of PowerPoint viewer that is pre-loaded with the Windows 8 distribution.
4. If you use Office 2010 it loads up Word really, really, fast. I mean really.
5. The IE 10 browser works fine, but I can’t find a way of getting Flash to work with it. I kept being referred to a release candidate of version 11 of Flash, which installs and doesn’t actually do anything.
6. However, Chrome works fine on the device. It is nowhere near as fun to use, but it plays videos like a good-un.
7. Don’t worry where all your programs have gone when you press Start. You don’t get the little menu that you are used to popping up, you get the whole lot on big tiles on the Start screen. After a while you get used to this.
8. If you want to drag things around your Start screen just press and hold,and then start dragging. It doesn’t seem to do much to indicate that it is draggable.
9. Setting a PIN number in addition to the password makes it much easer to get back to the machine.
10. I’ve got a proper tablet with Windows 8 on. Not quite ready for primetime, but I’ve got the box for my iPad out of the loft so that I can sell it on eBay when the Windows 8 beta comes out.

Ten Things I’ve Learnt about Windows 8

Ten things I’ve discovered playing with Windows 8 over my lunch break.

1. You need a dual layer DVD to make the complete system with development tools, it is over 5G. Scott Hanselman has some cunning things you can do with USB drives here.
2. You don’t need to boot from the distribution DVD, you can just run Setup from it.
3. If you do the install and say “keep nothing” it actually retains your old Windows settings in Windows.old.
4. It works. Really well. Runs quickly on my Packard Bell Butterfly Touch tablet.
5. It defaults to US keyboard, but you can change it to UK (in fact there are loads of keyboard types).
6. When it started all I could get was a green screen with nothing on it. Seems to have been something to do with the dual monitor settings (and I was seeing the wrong half of the screen on the tablet). I went into external monitors and turned something off and it works fine now.
7. The browser is wicked fast.
8. I tried to install the Windows Phone SDK and it didn’t end well. The system tried to install .NET 3.5 and then tipped over. Oh well.
9. There is an option to “refresh” Windows 8. This is supposed to knock it back to how it was when you received the machine. If you do this it will delete all the files on the device, including any old versions of Windows you were pleased to find still there after installation (see step 3).
10. I want a proper tablet with this on.

Windows 8 Keynote Fun

Windows 8 looks really interesting. And I mean really. This evening I watched the live keynote streamed from the Build conference (you can find a video here). Worth a look, behind all the marketing hype is a system that is a proper step forward. It was lovely to see something that puts touch interfaces to the fore.

For me the great thing is that it provides a user interface which is very similar to Windows Phone. The “Metro” interface which launched on Windows Phone 7 is now being rolled out onto Windows 8. Furthermore, with Live Tiles and a XAML powered front end it looks like any skills that you might have picked up making Windows Phone programs will map very nicely into Windows 8. In fact the new Visual Studio 2011 seems to make it possible to move applications between the platforms very easily.

Lucky delegates at the Build conference will be getting Samsung tablets with a developer preview of Windows 8 pre-loaded. For those of us not out there in LA Microsoft will be making the software available tomorrow for anyone to download and play with.