TechEd 2010 Speaker Lounge in Berlin

Made it to Berlin for TechEd 2010. They have these letters set up on the wall of the speaker lounge. Just crying out for anagrams. They’ve told me if I come up with any good ones they’ll let me put them up…

Tile Blindness

These look nice…

Spent some of this morning looking a tiles. I’ve discovered that I can only look at tiles for a certain amount of time before they start to all look the same. Especially if they are all white. The really good news here is that this time I’m just going to choose them. Somebody else is going to stick them on the wall….

Got my own Windows Phone Today

I must admit I was getting a bit worried. It looked as if I wasn’t going to get my shiny new hardware before going to Berlin next week.  Then I got a call from James at the Orange store saying that my chosen device had actually arrived in stock. Apparently there has been quite a run on Windows 7 phones and the one I wanted, the Samsung Omnia 7, was the hardest one to get hold of. I wanted the Samsung mainly because of the lovely screen, and also I’ve always liked things with square corners. I’ve seen pretty much all the WP7 devices now and there isn’t a bad one amongst them, but I like the angular lines of the Samsung best.

The phone is lovely. At last I have phone that is as stylish and well made as an iPhone, but it is not an iPhone. And I much prefer the user interface too. I’ve been using developer versions of Windows Phone for a while and they are OK, but having one in a proper box, and with a proper (sigh) contract makes it that much more official I reckon.  I’ve got a month or so left on my iPhone contract and so I’ll be carrying two phones around with me for a while, but I know which one I want to play with. And it runs Cheese Lander a treat…

Tech-Ed Good to Go

Well, all my slide decks are ready and I’ve made twelve demos (all different) for my TechEd sessions next week. All I have to do now is make sure I have enough pairs of socks for a week away….

Makerbot Thing-o-Matic

I would really (and I mean really) like one of these. It might be the last gadget I ever buy because, in theory, I could use it to make every other gadget I want for myself.  And I could make rabbits as well.

Windows Phone 7 Devices

Students keep coming by my office and showing me their new Windows Phone devices. A couple have the really nice HTC HP7, with the enormous screen, and today someone dropped by to show me a Samsung Omnia 7 which they were very proud of, and quite right too.

I’ve told them all they should have Marketplace accounts and should be making applications and games. Quite a few already are. When I get back from TechEd I think I’ll set aside an afternoon and help folks refine their programs and test them on real devices so that we can get a few more Hull student products out there. I’ve got some ideas for things that I’ll never have time to make myself, and so I think we’ll see if we can get some development action going on them too.

Cheap Ring Light

Some time ago I bought a ring light for my camera. This puts a bunch of super bright LEDs around the lens for illumination with no shadows. Works very well and wasn’t that expensive.  It is great for taking pictures of small items. I’ve just discovered that you can get something very similar for well under a fiver.

The Wilko Multi-purpose LED light is actually a very good light. We are going to use one to light up our summerhouse in these dark winter nights. However, it also has a hole in the middle where you can put a small camera lens, and so it also makes a rather good ring light. At less than a fiver it is well worth a look.

Worth tracking down, whether you are after lighting up underneath the stairs or taking interesting close-ups.

Tech Ed Deck Frenzy

Spent today working on my presentations for Tech Ed 2010. In exactly a week I’m going to be out in Berlin getting ready for the conference. I’m giving two sessions this year:

Wed. 10th November WPH307 – “Building Windows Phone Games with Microsoft XNA and Visual Studio 2010” at 12:00 pm in Hall 7.1b London 2

Thu. 11th November WPH310 – “Giving your Windows Phone XNA Games Plenty of Whizz and Bang” in Hall 7.3b Europa 1

I’m going in demo heavy for this one, with loads of stuff to show what you can do with Windows Phone and XNA. All the demo programs will be available for download so that you can download them and submit them to Marketplace learn how to write your own great games from them.

Should be fun. If you are going along to Berlin it would be great if you could drop by and say hi.

Saturday Photography

The light today was so good that I could have quite happily spent the entire day taking photographs.

I’ve finally found a camera/lens combination that does justice to the windows in Hull Holy Trinity Church.

Pong HD in the Windows Marketplace

Harry Overs, one of our second year students, has taken the version of Pong that he wrote for coursework in his first year and made it into a Windows phone game. It is now on the Marketplace for anyone to download. Harry got a free Marketplace membership from Dreamspark.com (any student can do this) and submitted the app a little while back. He did the bulk of the development on the emulator and then just popped into my office and tried the game on my device to make sure that the touch and tilt elements were properly calibrated.

Well done Harry. If you want to check out the game you can find it by searching the Marketplace for Pong HD. Any other Hull students out there with games they want to try on a real device, just drop round to my office and we’ll fire them up.

Note: This doesn’t include the two First Year students who bought the first two HTC HD7 devices in Hull, and stopped me from getting one….

Idiot Rob and his broadcast receipts

I’ve got lots more like these…

Today I finally got around to claiming money for some work that I did ages ago. (Actually, the results of the work have just been published here) . As part of the claims process Microsoft, not unreasonably, likes to see receipts of all the things I bought, including food and bits and bobs. So, I did what I usually do, which is make up a zip archive of all the relevant paperwork and put it on SkyDrive for Microsoft to read. This is not particularly confidential, so I just made a folder, dropped the file into it, emailed the link and thought nothing more of it.

Turns out this was really stupid. I forgot that lots of things out there are watching what I do and then sharing that information with lots of other people, including folks on  Facebook. I got a message last night that the file was visible and that Facebook had told all my friends about it.  I changed the protection so nobody could see it any more, but of course there are by now thousands of copies of the file out there on the web, and probably even a video on YouTube.

There’s nothing in the file that anyone couldn’t find out about me by doing a simple search of my name (apart from some aspects of my eating habits I guess) but I guess this is a salutary lesson to anyone who uses the cloud on a regular basis that if you want to keep thinks private, you should mark them private. Security through obscurity was never really an option, and with this kind of “auto publicity” it is now even less of one.

Update on 2010-10-29 15:39 by Rob

Turns out that this is easy to fix:

1. Go to your Windows Live Messenger Social page so that you can see the item you didn't want to put there.
2. Click the "gears" icon in the top right of the offending item to open the "Options" menu.
3. Select "More Options" from the menu.
4. On the page that appears next, clear the tickbox in "Updates about shared documents on SkyDrive"
5. Click Save.

No more updates about saved files.

Hull Digital Windows Phone Fun

I didn’t actually shout out “Look ‘Thoughtful’ Folks”, but it looks as if I might have done….

Had a great time at the Hull Digital Group meeting tonight. The topic for the night was mobile development. First up was John Connolly who gave a smashing talk on the pitfalls and potential of mobile development.

Then there was me. I gave a “Biased Overview of Windows Phone 7” where I extolled the virtues of the platform and very nearly showed my Windows Phone Twitter reader working. The audience was great, with some lovely discussion and very thoughtful questions at the end.  You can find the presentation and code files (including a version of that video game grate “Cheese Lander”) here.

Stay at Home Rob

I’ve spent the day working from home. I got a lot done, but I don’t really recommend  it much. There isn’t anyone to talk to. Not that I could have said much if there was. I’ve had this bad throat for a couple of weeks now, and my theory is that if talk a bit less it might get better. We shall see.

Broken Voice Blues

I felt fine first thing this morning. I even had enough energy to take some pictures as I walked from the car park to the university. But then I started talking. And realised I might have a problem. By the start of the first year lecture in the afternoon things were not great, and by the end of it I was really croaking. I think the combined strain of a cough and the Mad Development night have done for my voice.  At the moment I’m trying to run my life with hand signals, which is not going that well to be honest. But I have managed to get some ice-cream, which was lovely.

I think I’ll try to spend a day not talking tomorrow.

XNA Mad Game Development Ends

Compare this with the original picture……

Well, that was some wild ride. I feel like I’ve been to a really good, but really long, party. And in a way I have. We started yesterday at 11:00 with a game idea, some assets and some partially finished game engines. We ended today with 14 teams showing off some polished and workable game programs that I hope you will see on XNA Indie Games real soon. In between we’ve had pizza, snacks,  chocolate, a whole bunch of fizzy drinks and a lot of development. A lot.

I kept going into the labs thinking to myself “They must be ready for a break by now” and finding everyone working flat out. At three in the morning, four in the morning and five in the morning.  I watched teams get stuck, get inspired and finally get it working. Amazing stuff. Not everything went as planned,  but having that happen is just part of the development experience….

There is nothing quite like debugging somebody else’s code at 3 in the morning.  Peter and Sarah from 360 magazine were taking notes and pictures and getting into the spirit of the whole thing. Peter was even producing artwork for one team.

This morning we had the judging and the awards and then everyone went home to collapse. Especially me.  Congratulations to the winners:

• Judge’s Choice: “Team Ice Cream”
• People’s Choice: “Unhandled Exceptions”
• Technical Flair Award: “Left 4 Dev”
• Look and Feel:  “Who needs to go outside?”
• Cheesiest Game: “Generic Game Developers”

The judges also wanted to make a special award to team “Rusty Spoons” who came in on Saturday as First Year students who have only been coding for a few weeks and produced a fully working game by the end.

We then had a bunch of further awards and then headed off to bed. Best bit for me? When I asked if they wanted to do it again and everyone looked up with sleep deprived eyes and said “Oh yes”.

Great fun. Thanks to Peter Gothard from 360 Magazine for the idea and the swag. Microsoft UK for the extra swag, Warren for paying for the food and our two other judges, Jon Purdy and David Miles.

I’ll have a full list of all the awards and winners later, and there are some more pictures on Flickr. But I’m off to bed now…

Mad Game Development Gets Going

This was the scene at the start of the day. Quite a few folks have turned up since then.

Thanks Simon.

More pictures as we we go through the night.

Farseer Friday

Do you want to knock your house off a shelf?

Did my Farseer lecture today. Still very impressed with the number of students who turned up, and teams that want to take part. If you want to see a screencast of the talk or get hold of the sample code you can find it all here.

Get into Physics with your XNA games

If I have one piece of advice for budding game developers who are into XNA and looking for somewhere to go, it would be “Get Into a Physics Engine”. We’ve been playing with various versions of Farseer in XNA and they are well worth the effort. Lots of problems concerned with making things move in a realistic way just vanish when you plug in one of these magical libraries. I’ll be doing  a very quick overview of how to make simple things happen in XNA with Farseer Version 2 in the talk tomorrow.

Note to Mad Game Developers: I’ve moved the talk to LTA because of a clash with a First Year tutorial at 1:15 tomorrow.

Destruction Golf in XNA

Did my XNA session today for the Mad Game Developers. Good turn out, and some interesting games out there. Good to see Physics engines being used, they make life much easier. Perhaps the next version of XNA could have one built in…

Anyhoo, I recorded the session as a screencast, just to see if it would work. The level was a bit high, so the sound is a bit clipped, but it is OK, apart from the bits where I’m pointing at the screen and talking about things…..

If you want to see how to create very simple projectiles in XNA, and then pan the screen to follow them around, then it might be worth a watch. Click through the image above to take a look. You can get the sample app from here.

Sample XNA Destruction Golf Application

I think I might need to get some help with the artwork though….

As part of the Mad Game Development this week I’ve been putting together a demonstration XNA game that shows how to do sideways scrolling, firing a projectile and causing damage. It is coming along nicely. If you want to find out more, come along to Room 312 in the Robert Blackburn Building tomorrow and I’ll go through how it all works.

I’ve had loads of teams signing up during the day, this is going to be great fun.