Mega Student Sessions at TechDays

I like a big audience, but, blimey.

Did a couple of Student to Business sessions in TechDays today. Great fun. Above are the folks who turned up to the first one. Click to through to the larger Flickr image and try to find yourself on the picture (Note – only do this if you were actually at the session)

This is the slightly smaller audience at the second session. I think word must have got out by this point….

Tech Days is being held in a massive cinema complex near Brussels. They have some old projectors in the foyer, this is a close up of one of them.

Now on to the Netherlands and Geek Night.

Update on 2012-02-16 18:22 by Rob

I promised I'd post the slides and demos here. I'll do this soon. If you are in a hurry the decks and demos were very similar to the ones I delivered yesterday.

Tech Days Belgium

Another country, another audience…

Today it was up bright and early to fly to the Netherlands and take a train to Belgium for my sessions at TechDays. I’m giving sessions on Windows Phone and Kinect. I always wonder just why I do this kind of thing, particularly when I’m sat on a train watching unfamiliar countryside whizz past in the rain. Then the session starts and I remember why. Great fun. Great audience and a good response from all. I promised I’d put the slides and content on the interwebs and so here it is. Remember, if you make a fortune from anything based on it I’m in for 10%. It’s only fair…

This was my setup for the talk.

The only snag was that when I got back to the hotel I found that they’d run out of numbers for access to the hotel WIFI. Apparently a new system is being installed tomorrow and at the moment they have no network access. So this post is being made from the future.

Nokia in Sunshine

I took this picture yesterday, when the sun was shining. Apparently the Lumia has some fancy polarisation magic that it does to make the screen visible in bright sunlight. Seems to work too.

Windows Phone Emulator Skin Switcher

If you are bored with the Windows Phone that you get with Visual Studio you can swap it for a much nicer looking device by downloading the Windows Phone 7 emulator Skin Switcher from here.

Made in Hull

These are some of the games and applications that students and staff at Hull have made over the last few months. Some of them are implementations of games produced at Three Thing Game and Evil Squash.

To take a more detailed look, just click on the icon to be magically transported into Windows Marketplace.

Nokia Blue Case

I think my Lumia 800 is turning me into a fashion victim. I got the Nokia blue case today. Looks pretty good too, as you can see. Special prize for naming the person in the back of the picture. I love the way that the case doesn’t look like a case, it just looks like I have a cool, blue phone. Which I have.

If you want to be cool too, Amazon have them in stock in a range of colours, look for the magic stock number Nokia CC-1031.

Escape Characters in XNA fonts

I’m making a sister application for the PlayMusic application. The PlayMusic program doesn’t do much, it just starts playing a random playlist when you run it. Not a lot of functionality, but it does mean you can start music playing by issuing a spoken command. I’ve had nearly a thousand downloads up to now, so a few people must find it useful.

The PlayMeMore application will do something similar. When you run it the program will find the album that the currently playing song is part of, and then play that album. I want this because frequently on random play I hear a track that I’ve not heard for a while, and fancy hearing the album it came from. I thought it would be nice to be able to say “Start PlayMeMore” and have it do this for you.

I’ve written the program in XNA because I like XNA and I might add a visualisation or two later. The program displays the name of the album when it starts it. By a wonderful quick of fate the first album it tried to play was Bête Noire by Bryan Ferry (darned good album too). And the program crashed. Any idea why? Took me a few minutes to work it out. It has to do with SpriteFonts.

When you use a font in XNA it builds a raster with the character designs on it. The font requirements are given in an little XML file that specifies the TrueType font to be used for the character designs. This font also specifies which character codes are rendered. And the default character codes don’t include the character ê. The fix is simple enough, open the file and make the end value a bit bigger.

    <CharacterRegions>
      <CharacterRegion>
        <Start>&#32;</Start>
        <End>&#255;</End>
      </CharacterRegion>
    </CharacterRegions>

Normally the end value is 126, but this does not include accented characters like ê. Making the value 255 seems to fix the problem. And I’ve put a try-catch around my DrawString calls in case I hit any music info that has any weird characters in it. Like the artist formally known as Prince….

Get your apps out there….

I had one of those happy/sad moments today. Someone showed me a stunning little game they’d written for Windows Phone. Snappy graphics and fun to play. “Is it in the Marketplace?” I asked. “No” was the reply.

Some people hold back until their game is “finished”. This is a bad idea. There is no such thing as finished as far as a developer is concerned. You can always add bits, make it better, tidy up the class design, make all the curly brackets line up. But if you keep on like that you never get anything out there. I’m not saying that you should push out broken programs, I’m saying that things like on-line high score tables, multi-player, extra levels, a level editor etc can always be added later.

The faster you can get something out there the faster you can start getting feedback and recognition. So go for it.

Free Windows Phone Curriculum

This DVD arrived in the post today. It contains a whole bunch of Windows Phone curriculum content, some of which was written by me.  It includes stuff about Windows Phone development and Windows Azure on the phone.

If you want a DVD of your own, or to download the content you can find it here.

Lumia 800 Going Red

Got a spiffy red case for my Lumia 800 today. I like the way that it really looks part of the phone, even to the way that the buttons show through holds in the case itself. I’ve got a blue one on order so that I can change the colour to reflect my mood. As long as I only have three moods – black, red and blue.

1000 Downloads of TipLight

Some time last year I had a silly idea for a program where you could control the colour of your phone screen by just tipping it around. I spent around an hour making the code and adding some averaging so that the colour didn’t flicker too much when you moved the phone and then I forgot all about it.

Last year, just before Christmas I thought I’d get some more applications in Windows Phone Marketplace. (this has nothing to do with wanting to pick up some more points for the Windows Phone Rewards programme of course).

Anyhoo, just had my thousandth download of what is the silliest of all the programs that I’ve made. If you want a copy for your phone, you can get it here.

If you liked the program then you might like this one too (which is quite fun but could probably do with a bit of work on the difficultly levels )

The Red Nose game was great fun to write and you can get it for free here.

PlayMusic for Windows Phone

I seem to be on a Windows Phone application roll at the moment. This one has just gone live in the Marketplace too. I had the idea for it when I was driving into work last Tuesday. I built the application in around an hour, spent 30 minutes or so making it pretty and building the icons and then submitted it into Windows Phone Marketplace. And now you can load it.

It doesn’t do much, but I find it useful. I built it as a workaround to get music playing when I’m driving along. I like to be able to start the music playing using voice commands and I’ve not found a way to do this with the phone. I can start programs running (including Zune) but I can’t start music playing. This may be something that I’ve missed, but I enjoyed writing the application anyway so it is not a loss as far as I am concerned.

I can get music playing by just using the voice command “Start PlayMusic”. When the application runs it just picks a random playlist (or album if there are no playlists on the phone) and plays it. If the music is already playing it does nothing. The program also displays a pithy message (those took longer to think up than writing the actual program code). If it solves a problem for you, then grab a copy.

TipLight for Windows Phone

Some time back I had an idea for a Windows Phone app that displayed a coloured torch (flashlight) that you could control by tipping the phone. And now it is in Windows Phone marketplace. Just tip the phone to get the colour you want and then tap the screen to lock it. Tap the screen again to tip and select another colour.

Mr Squeek’s Roller Coaster Ride

One of the student teams in our Three Thing Game this October ended up with “Fairground, mouse, jungle quest”. So they came up with Mr. Squeek’s Jungle Roller Coaster ride. It is now in Windows Phone Marketplace as a free download.

Not sure why it is called “grind”, but that is the best way to find it. Great fun.

Media Player and Marketplace Certification with Windows Phone

One of our students was having problems with Marketplace Certification for his XNA game. The game was failing certification because his game background music was playing over the top of any media that the phone user was listening to. There is a simple way to fix this, which is not to play your game music if the user is listening to something. You can do this by testing to see if the media player is stopped before playing your music:

if (MediaPlayer.State == MediaState.Stopped)
{
    // play your own music here
}

The MediaPlayer class lives in the System.XNA.Media namespace. If you are writing a Silverlight game you’ll have to import the XNA libraries.

Skydrive from Windows Phone Apps

The latest version of the Windows Live Connect APIs let Windows Phone 7 apps interact with the Skydrive storage of phone users. This makes it possible for us to write programs that authenticate users and store pictures and documents in the Cloud. I reckon this is a really significant development as it opens up lots of really interesting possibilities for connected applications.

Find out how to get started here.You can find a sample Windows Phone application that uploads pictures here.

Old Age Gadgets

I was up in the loft today getting down our Christmas tree and found a few things that I thought would be fun to photograph.

Remember this?

I think I’ll print a large version of this to stick on the wall.

My first mobile phone next to my present mobile phone.

Project Hawaii For Windows Phone

Project Hawaii is a set of cloud services for Windows Phone users which make it really easy to do things like heavy computation, storage, location mapping, optical character recognition and speech recognition. They also provide a really useful relay service that allows phones to communicate directly even though their IP addresses might be local to their operator carrier’s network.

It is free for students and academics, you only need to give your Windows Live ID to get a key and get started. You can download the SDK and have a play from here.

Hull Windows Phone Winners

Hot on the heels of the news of the competition comes news of the winners. Danny and Steve from our department have both won phones. And very nice they are apparently (front facing camera and all). Extra kudos to Danny for pitching a version of Evil Squash. Now we want to see your stuff in the Marketplace.

A Windows Phone for Christmas

If you are lucky enough to be a student you should head off pronto to the UK Student Blog and see about getting yourself a free Windows Phone. All you have to do is show the bods at Microsoft a screenshot of your application running in the emulator and then promise on your honour to put it onto the Windows Phone Marketplace in time for the Christmas rush. If they like the cut of your jib they’ll send you a phone, no strings attached (after all, that is how wireless phones work you know).

Any of our First Year students who have Evil Squash running on Windows Phone (and there are a few) should get into gear pronto and get themselves into the mix. I want Evil Squash in the marketplace before Christmas and I promise to buy a copy of every version. After all, I’ll need something to do at all the parties I get invited to….