..another satisfied customer..
Michael came to see me today and pick up his Windows Phone prize, having showed an impressive set of Marketplace download figures for a game that was written, tested and marketed without having access to an actual device. Good work.
Apparently the phone is now running the latest version of Mango, which was quick work.
A couple of weeks ago Andy Wigley and I spent two days taking about Windows Phone development, with a focus on the shiny new Mango features. We did it as a Live Meeting and it was great fun. Now the recordings of the sessions have been released here to a waiting world.
So, why not uncork a nice Chablis, retire to your chaise longue and watch us in glorious high definition on your 60 inch plasma screen…..
There are some great places to wander round here, and some superb pavement cafes.
Today we spent the morning wandering round Brno and then in the afternoon I went out to give a couple of Windows Phone talks.
As usual I took a picture of the folks who turned up, there is another on Flickr which shows the rest of the room. The talk was great, really good audience. You can find slide decks and demo programs for the two sessions here. The sessions you want are the Introduction to Silverlight (02) and Introduction to XNA (11). The decks are part of the Windows Phone Jumpstart series, you can find decks on lots of other interesting Windows Phone topics as well. In a little while there will be some videos as well.
After the talk we went out for a drink and then headed for a walk around Brno by night.
Enjoying a drink..
The bar had these really cool speakers
These folks were really (and I mean really) good.
Brno station by night.
Thanks for doing such a great job of guiding us around folks, it was a really splendid evening.
We have another winner of an LG Optimius 7 phone. This time the result was actually pretty close. But in the end Michael Clayton came in with a well impressive set of figures for his Breakout game. Congratulations sir. Catch up with me in the department and I’ll give you your prize. Thanks to LG and the Windows Phone team for sponsoring the competition. Perhaps we’ll have more competitions soon…
A couple of things to remember today:
Optimus Quest 2
If you want to send me some Windows Phone Marketplace stats before the end of the month (i.e. tomorrow) then you might have a chance to win an LG Optimus 7 Windows Phone. Send your screenshots of the Marketplace to optimusQuest2@robmiles.com
Job with Rob
The closing date for applications to the Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) which I mentioned earlier is quite soon. If you fancy working on a really interesting project in a nice part of the world you should get your applications in before Thursday.
What the Outside World™ looks like round here. Pity Borders is closing.
We did the last sessions today. Great fun. Andy did most of the morning, and I did the afternoon. Lots of great questions and congratulations to Frank Mondorf and Kelvin Challcot who won Windows Phones and Alexander Shevchenko who won the “Private Jet”.
If you are looking for the content (all the slides and the sample code that we showed off) you can find it on the BornToLearn site for the course.
There were some questions that we couldn’t answer in detail during the sessions, I’ll try to remember what they were and put up answers on this blog. One I recall was about the Windows Phone Desktop Passthrough program (WPDTPT), which you need to debug applications on the phone that use media. You can find this on your machine in the tools folder for your SDK installation. This is where they are on my machine.
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.1\Tools\WPConnect
You run this in place of the Zune client if you want to debug programs that use media content on the phone. Normally such programs won’t work because the phone locks media when it is syncing to Zune. This is how you use it:
You can run the WPConnect program by double clicking from the desktop, but that makes it harder to see whether it worked or not.
More answers as I remember the questions….
Jeff takes aim
Did the first day of Jumpstart today. We had a bunch of winners, and we need some of them to get in touch so that if they win the phone (or the “private jet”) we can send it through. Here are the names of the folks that I copied down during the session. If you are on the list and there is a * next to your name, send me a mail at iwon@robmiles.com and we’ll sort you out.
We had a great time, some wonderful interaction and super questions. More tomorrow, including the XNA stuff. You can still sign up for the next day at http://bit.ly/Mango-Jump
Frank and Jeff solving problems.
Today was the in-studio pre for the Jumpstart tomorrow. This is when we set everything up and then try to see if it all works. It is kind of important that we are comfortable here because, as Jeff says “Your guys are going to be spending around 16 hours in those chairs…”.
Andy looking thoughtful
For tea we went to a place with a really good view, although by the time I got around to taking a picture the cloud had come in a bit.
Anyhoo, everything is pretty much good to go. We’ve even written the review questions and persuaded Stephanie to get us a private jet as the big prize. (some winners will have to make do with Windows Phones instead…)There’s still time to sign up if you head on over to Windows Phone Mango Jump Start. All fun, and all free.
Well, here we are. Another plane trip, another hotel room, more getting up at 1:00am feeling somewhat rested and refreshed and knowing you are actually neither of those things. I’m here to do the Windows Phone Mango Jump Start, which begins on Tuesday. Andy and I will be streaming 7 hours a day of Windows Phone content, from getting started all the way to using the shiny new Mango features like Fast Application Switching. Sign up now if you like, it’s free. The timings mean that it will be streamed rather late in the day for UK viewers, so I can see it being used as the basis of a rather good drinking game. I’ll leave you to invent your own rules.
Anyhoo, I’m wandering round the hotel room with a camera, as you do, and taking happy snaps.
How many pillows does one man need? This room has a catalogue, I could actually buy this exact same set and carry them all back to Hull. But then again, not.
Not been to Redmond Town Center before (I have to spell it that way because I’m in America).
I do like a place that has a nice sky.
Aptly named place.
I love my little Alienware MI1x notebook. It has oodles of power, a good battery life and a keyboard that lights up with different colours. That’s a keyboard that lights up with different colours, always the first thing I look for in a laptop.
Anyhoo, while putting the latest version of the Windows Phone SDK on it I hit a snag. Although it seemed to have finished, if I tried to run the emulator I got silly messages about the emulator already running. Worse still, after a reboot of the machine (always the weapon of first resort) the Windows Phone emulator came up with a “Windows Phone Emulator is doing a complete OS boot”. For ever.
Not good. A quick search of the interwebs through up various solutions, none of which worked. Until I found one that mentioned the dual graphics cards in these laptops, and the problems that they can cause. The Alienware has two graphics cards inside. A “Clark Kent” one that us used for meek and mild applications and good battery life and a “Superman” one for high performance games and stuff. For some reason (perhaps because I’d been fiddling) this had got itself set to “high performance”, and this was breaking the installation,and subsequent use, of the emulator. If you are having problems installing the Windows Phone SDK on your laptop I’d advise you drop it into “Clark Kent” or low performance mode and see if that fixes it. Worked for me.
I seem to doing PR for all the Windows Phone games written by Hull Students. I don’t have a problem with this. If you are Hull student just send me an email with the deep link to your program and I’ll give it a mention. Michael sent me an email and here is his breakout game. Looks fun. You can get a free copy here:
http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=04db085e-d301-4cb9-8f0e-92d78229766e
Last year Andy Wigley and myself had enormous fun doing some Jump Start Live training sessions. They were very intense, and horribly hard work, and we are doing the same thing all over again. Just to prove we still can.
If you want 14 hours of intense Windows Phone Mango training over 2 days, plus a whole bunch of old jokes and the chance to win your own private jet (Fact: We did give away two private jets last year) then clear your diary for the 23rd and 24th of August and sign up here. It will be fun. Trust me.
Marc has just written another game. If you have a Windows Phone you can download it here:
He is quite pleased with himself at the moment. Turns out that Vampire Labyrinth, the game he and his team made in the “Three Thing Game” we did earlier this year has won a bunch of Microsoft prizes, including a shiny new phone.
Joseph with his prize
Joseph Appleyard came into the office today to pick up his prize for the greatest number of Windows Phone Marketplace downloads up to July.
If you want to add to his number, and get hold of his DND companion application, you can find it here:
http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=effe0566-c375-e011-81d2-78e7d1fa76f8
I’ve got another phone to give away at the end of August. If you didn’t win this time, and are still a Hull student, you can enter then. Don’t forget.
I’d nearly forgotten about the Optimus Quest 2 that I set way back in June. I’ve got two LG Optimus 7 phones to give away, and they are going to the students who show me the most impressive download stats in Windows Phone Marketplace for their applications. Fortunately Joseph Appleyard hadn’t forgotten, and of the entries I received his was the one with most downloads. Well done Joseph, send me your postal address and I’ll get the phone sent out for you. As you are a registered developer you can then upgrade it to Windows Phone Mango and have all kinds of new fun.
If you want to enter again, I’ve got another phone going on the same basis at the end of August. The only person that can’t win it is Joseph…..
When I upgraded my Samsung to the latest version of Mango I lost my beloved custom ringtone. I’d used the Chevron tool to set the ringtone ages ago, and the “undocumented feature” that made it work must have been withdrawn/fixed. Anyhoo, nothing is going to keep me from my precious ringtone, so I set about fixing this.
One of the improvements in Windows Phone Mango is that it lets you set your own ringtones. There is even a sample application here that does this. However,it is a bit too complicated for me. I just have a wma file that I want to make into a ringtone on the phone. That’s what this program does. Just add your wma file in place of Ringtone.wma and build and deploy the program. Run it and press the Set Ringtone button and follow the instructions. If all is well you should get a toast pop up telling you the ringtone has been deployed. You can then select the ringtone on the phone.
Of course your phone needs to be developer unlocked for this to work. Just one more reason to become a Windows Phone developer.
This is how the campus looks today. Feel free to compare it with Harvard Yard any time you like….
The latest version of Windows Phone Mango is now trickling out to developers. If you’ve upgraded to the first developer version of the platform you should soon get a message telling you an upgrade is available. Indeed there is. This one is really close to what people will be getting when Windows Phone 7.5 (to give it its proper name) will be released. It now has the Twitter integration which works really well, along with a whole host of extra goodies that I’m having great fun playing with. If you are not into Windows Phone development then you really should be.
Mango Upgrade - Star Trek fans please note
I upgraded my “proper” phone to Mango yesterday. I wasn’t going to, the plan was just to upgrade a developer phone and use that to play with the new SDK features. However, once I’d played with the system for a while I just had to do it so I can use Mango as much as possible.
One of the things that I used to love about my iPhone was the way that I really enjoyed using it. I’d fire it up knowing that whatever I was going to do, from create an appointment to surf the internets, would be fun. The people who make the iPhone really seem to understand how software must not get in the way, it should just make doing things better. With Mango, Windows Phone has reached that point. I love the way that it organises all the interactions with friends into single strand. I can see all the phone calls, emails, texts and messages in one conversation, which is just so nice. Being able to make family groups who I can message and deal with as a single entity is great too.
One thing I used to do with the iPhone was spend an evening browsing the App Store and parting with a couple of pounds (less than the price of a pint of beer) on little programs that would be fun to play with. The Windows Phone Marketplace is by no means as large as the App Store, but it is plenty big enough for me to start doing this again. And now we have Angry Birds and Plants vs Zombies (two must buys) as well.
There are still a couple of things missing to make my Windows Phone experience perfect. I’d love to have Street View for the navigation (although on the plus side I now have turn by turn navigation with spoken directions) and not having BBC iPlayer is sometimes a bit of a pain, but I now have a phone that I open up knowing it is going to be fun to use, which is really great.
If you are a Marketplace Developer I’d strongly advise you to get Mango on your device. Sure, it will make you able to play with the new code libraries, but it will also give you a really nice phone experience. I’ve said before I reckon that version 3.0 is when Microsoft start to really nail their products and Mango is definitely proof of this theory.
In case you were wondering what a Mango actually looks like. I think you should know that I had to buy this picture from iStockPhoto….
Big things afoot in Windows Phone 7 land.
Firstly, the latest version (7.1 beta 2) of the toolchain is now available. You can get it from here. This lets you create Windows Phone apps for the Mango build. It replaces version 7.1 beta 1, which you must remove before you install this one. A tip, I download the iso image (there is a link on the download site) and burn it to a disk. Then I can update machines at home without losing all my network bandwidth.
Secondly, and this is the big one, all registered Marketplace developers will get access to a Microsoft Connect program which will enable them to put Mango system images onto their developer devices. And not just the special developer phones. This means that I should be able to get some Mango goodness onto my Samsung Omnia 7. Wonderful. The email invitations are going out at the moment. Not got mine yet, but I’m watching my inbox.
Thirdly, if you are a student you can take advantage of a new DreamSpark inspired competition. Here are the instructions, hand stolen from the WindowsTeam Blog (I always think that says Window Steam Blog – but that’s just me).
Great stuff. Windows Phone is going from strength to really strong.
Don’t forget my Optimus Quest competition. The Hull student with the most Windows Phone Marketplace downloads up to the end of July 2011 will win a shiny new Optimus 7 device. Then we do it all again in August.
Full details here.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
A proper developer conference in Hull. Find out more here.
