Devdays Sessions now on Channel 9
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All my DevDays sessions have now made it onto Channel 9. Enjoy.
Embedded Development with the .NET Micro Framework
Windows Phone Development in Rhyme
If you want any of the demo code you can find it on:
Data Structures in C#
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This article has been around for a while, but it is beautifully written and well worth a read. Particularly if you are doing a First Year Computer Science Course with a Data Structures component…
http://create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/article/data_structures
Hull Student Winners
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Forgot to mention that a couple of weeks ago one of our students was lucky enough to win an Acer Iconia (which looks awesome) in the Think.Dev weekly awards. All Josh had to do was sign up and submit some applications to Windows Phone Marketplace.
If you fancy some of this action (and who wouldn’t) you can sign up here.
In other Hull student news, Harry Over’s version of Destruction Golf has been riding high in the Windows Phone Marketplace for a while now, getting loads of downloads and comments for what is an on-going development.
A Tip: Don’t wait until all your game levels are complete before putting the game out into the Marketplace. It is very easy to release upgrades to an existing program and quite a few developers are producing “episodic” content where they are releasing new versions at regular intervals.
Bought a New Zune HD
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There has been a bit of talk lately about Microsoft discontinuing the Zune hardware. I hope they don’t. Although they have not been on sale in Europe I’ve been using the devices pretty much since they came out.
The Zune HD was released a little while back and is a truly lovely device. I’ve played with iPods and other music players, but I prefer the sound of the Zune device, and really like the user interface. I can also use the lovely Zune Pass to get all I can eat music for nine quid a month.
The other thing about the Zune that I like is that it doesn’t seem to age. I’ve got a first generation device and it looks pretty much like it did when I bought it. My iPod on the other hand looks somewhat battle scarred.
Some Apple products seem designed to age badly. The ultra-shiny backs really attract scratches and drive someone like me, who is somewhat obsessive about keeping his stuff looking new, up the wall. They also don’t get the same software support when they grow old. My iPod can’t do lots of things simply because Apple don’t release firmware upgrades for it. In contrast my early Zunes can do everything the brand new ones can, because they have been upgradable all the time.
I’ve just managed to pick up a 64G Zune at a very good price for such a capacious best. It looks lovely and works a treat. If you are looking for a music player with really good sound quality and a nice user interface you could do a lot worse.
DevDays 11 Windows Phone in Rhyme
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My Geek Night Windows Phone session in Rhyme is now available for viewing at Channel 9.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/DevDays/DevDays-2011-Netherlands/Devdays055
May Day Bank Holiday Happiness
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Rob’s recipe for May Day Bank Holiday Happiness
- Drive to Whitby.
- Enter “The Magpie Cafe”
- Order “Magpie Fish Pie” and a pot of tea
- Eat and drink same
- Go for walk on pier and beach
- Take loads of pictures
Oh, and stop off in Bainton at the Wolds Village for a cream tea on the way back.
Tidying Up
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It seems that there is a difference between tidying up and picking something up and putting it down somewhere else.
Use Micro Fibre for Shiny Gadgets
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I reckon the Scotch ones are the best.
I was lucky enough to be able to spend some time with Scott Hanselman over the DevDays conferences. Scott is one of these folks who have technology running through their veins. It was great to see his eyes light up whenever he was showing off a cool new program or discussing the future of computing. However, I did actually have a gadget that managed to impress him, which was nice.
At one point during our chat I produced the micro-fibre cloth that I carry round to make my Windows Phone shiny bright before each demo. This went down very well, and was promptly put to work shining up all the devices we used for the keynote.
If you want to get rid of all the pesky fingerprints that these devices seem to accumulate then I recommend that you get one or two. You can get really good ones from the Pound Shops in the UK and places like Tesco also do multi-packs at a good price. But if you are properly rich you can get the original Scotch versions above.
XNA Windows Phone Session at DevDays 11
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Two more halves of a room and one last Windows Phone XNA session. I seem to have taken a lot of audience pictures over the last few weeks. Thanks to you all for making the final session such a great one. Remember folks that you can get all the code that you saw from my demo pages:
The marks the end of my World Tour for a little while. Thanks to Helen for organising the European leg so well, and to Microsoft for inviting me along.
Windows Phone in Rhyme at Geek Night
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Some of the audience arriving. 
The rest of the audience arriving
Well, that was fun. Once I found my notes. Thanks to the audience for really getting into the spirit of the event. The roar every time we had a “Silverlight Rhyme Alert” was most impressive. Hope you all had a good time. You can find the notes from the original Red Nose Day lecture here.
If you would like to donate to the Red Nose Day cause (which is very, very worthy and does lots of good work around the world) then you can find my donation page here.
And now I’m going for a lie down…
Recalcitrant Robots
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Both sides of the room, click through to larger versions on Flickr.
I did my most “challenging” presentation this afternoon. Robots, hardware and the .NET Micro Framework. Lots of things to go wrong, and most of them tried to. However, having carried my robot, a controller and a radio watch all the way around Europe I was going to do my level best to make sure that they worked at the end.
And work they did. In the end I had two debugging sessions running at the same time, one in the controller and the other in the robot. It was nice when the command went out of the controller and the robot program hit a breakpoint to indicate that the message had been received. Everyone was watching patiently to see the robot jump off the desk and shatter on the floor. Fortunately this didn’t actually happen, but the programs did all work.
Thanks for being a patient audience folks and remember, you are all embedded developers now.
Dev Days Keynote and Ambition
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Also available for parties and discos…
Some time back I was asked the very perceptive question “What are your ambitions?” This is not a question that I get asked very often, and it gave me pause to think a bit about life. Eventually I said “One day I’d like to take part in a keynote presentation at a technical conference”. The keynote is the big session right at the start where everyone attending the conference turns up to hear some talks that set the scene for what follows.
Today I got to do that. I was on the same billing as Scott Hanselman, Wade Wegner and Ben Riga. I was talking about the joys of Windows Phone game development.
Everyone had their own laptop, mine is the Dell nearest (and they kept making fun of it because the video output was a bit dodgy).
Brandon Foy’s video looks great, even from the back of the screen. Remember that you can see it here:
http://www.youtube.com/windowsphone
The presentations were all great, although I must admit I wasn’t concentrating that much – what with being the last man in. My bit seemed to go OK, which was nice.
I now have to move on to my next ambition, which is to buy Bill Gates a drink. I’d just love to be standing at the bar with Bill, see him reach towards his pocket to pay for the glasses of Coke and say “No worries Bill, I’ve got this” and the produce my wallet….
Windows Phone XNA in TechDays Antwerp
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This is the Metropolis in Antwerp. Nice venue.
This is my usual picture of the audience arriving.
Did my first Windows Phone session of this part of my “World Tour” ™. I’m at Tech-Days in the Netherlands tomorrow and Friday. Thanks for being a great audience folks, although with the bright lights it was a bit hard to see if there was anyone out there (although I did hear some clapping from time to time). You can find all the code I talked about, and a lot more, in my demo directory:
Heading to Antwerp
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Some of these trains do not exist.
In the Netherlands trains don’t run late. They just don’t run. Which makes for all kinds of fun and games if you try to use the ones that aren’t there. The 14:07 from Schipol airport to Antwerp made a brief guest appearance on the station display before vanishing. After a while I got to recognise the “apologetic cough” in Dutch that pre-ceded messages about trains that weren’t going to run. Even though I couldn’t understand much of the rest of the announcements.
Fortunately they announce the international trains in English too (I still find the idea of trains that “go abroad” really exciting) and so I was able to figure out how to get to Rotterdam and then change for Antwerp. And here I am. The hotel is great, the presentations are written and the demos are working. I’ve even found a McDonalds to have tea in. Looking forward to tomorrow.
Antwerp Central Station looking good.
Ready for Tech Days
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I’m doing some bits and bobs at TechDays around Europe this week, starting with a Windows Phone gaming session in Antwerp on Wednesday 27th, then a keynote session, a Micro Framework session and a Geek Night Windows Phone session in rhyme on Thursday at The Hague in the Netherlands. On Friday, assuming I survive, I’m doing another Windows Phone gaming session. At the moment I’m busy preparing all the content and demos. I’m making something completely new for the keynote, and I’m rather pleased to find that it is mostly working, which is nice.
You can find out about TechDays in the Netherlands here:
You can find out about TechDays in Antwerp here:
http://www.microsoft.com/belux/techdays/2011/
I head out tomorrow, I’m trying to squeeze a robot, microcontroller, laptop and all my other bits and bobs into a single carry on bag.
Parrot Drone Flying
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The Parrot AR Drone is an amazing device. It contains a whole bunch of digital technology, including a WIFI access point, two cameras, an ultrasonic rangefinder and four computer controlled rotors. You can fly it from your iPhone and you see a view from the camera in the front of the device as you remotely pilot it around. Today we had a go at flying it, and it works really well, once you have told it that it is flying outdoors. This takes some limits off the behaviours, making it more able to cope with the small headwind.
It really is impressive to watch. It just hangs in the air waiting for commands, and it is very easy to control. In fact, in some ways it is too easy. If you leave it along it just flies, if you give it directions it just follows them, and then waits for some more. Even landing is mostly boring, except for once or twice when it flipped upside down for no reason. There are some augmented reality games you can get, and of course it gets really fun if you have someone else with a drone to fight against.
They are a bit pricey (fortunately I didn’t pay for this one, we use it in the department) but the biggest problem is the battery life. You can get around 10-12 minutes of flying time before the lithium ion battery needs a top up. I’d definitely get a couple of spares if I was going to get serious about flying a drone.
Mansions of Madness
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Now, this is what I call a board game. Cards, tokens, plastic figures, a die with 10 sides and a huge thick book of rules. Fortunately for us number one son was able to act as the one controlling the scenario, although fortunately might be going it a bit, as most of the time he was happily sending zombies and axe wielding maniacs our way.
The Mansions of Madness game is different each time you play it, with a set of different levels to work through. While this limits the lifetime of the game a bit, in that once you’ve played a level once you’d not want to play it again, it does make for quite a rich experience, and if you price it out in evenings worth of entertainment it starts to look good value, even if the game itself is quite expensive.
I played a gangster with a Tommy gun and a down on monsters in general, but with a quite astounding lack of physical ability, as evidenced by my knack of throwing exactly the wrong numbers consistently. However, with help from a typewriter wielding companion we managed to solve the gruesome mystery and get out alive. Towards the end things got really tense, as I struggled to shoot a zombie and avoid being burnt alive, while at the same time hunting to uncover the awful truth.
One good thing about this particular game is that although it is necessarily quite complex, the games themselves don’t take around a week or so to finish, we ended up having a couple of hours of fun, which is just about right I reckon. A good, social, alternative to watching the telly or playing video games methinks.
Get Portal 2
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I’ve spent a reasonable amount of time over the last few days watching number one son play Portal 2. I quite like watching other people play video games. Whenever I play most of my time is spent being dead or otherwise inconvenienced. Number one son does not seem to have these problems, although in Portal the nice thing is that you are not actually under threat of sudden death most of the time. Unless you do something stupid in one of the puzzles that is of course. And there are a lot of puzzles. Along with the sing-song voice of the psychotic computer and another computer who also records adverts for a bank and works with Ricky Gervais. Or something.
The game is really good. Really good. So good I might just invest in a copy myself. Apparently if you get the PS3 version you also get a token allowing you to download a copy for your PC or Mac, which is nice.
I think it helps if you have played the previous version first, you can pick that up as part of the wonderful “Orange Box” compilation for most platforms.
SS Great Britain
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The SS Great Britain was one of the first large propeller powered vessels.
Up until the SS Great Britain nobody thought much of making ships out of metal. Especially iron, what with its well know lack of floating ability. Isambard Kingdom Brunel reckoned it would work though, and built an enormous ship to prove it. I wish I’d thought to have given one of my kids the middle name “Kingdom”, but I digress.
Today we went round the first “modern” ship ever built. Instead of using wood, with lots of internal bracing and strengthening, Brunel decided you could make a perfectly workable boat out of metal plate. Moreover, making it really large would mean that you could carry enough coal on board to power the thing on long journeys.
And it worked. The ship had a long history, from carrying 200 passengers across the Atlantic in absolute luxury to carrying 600 would be gold diggers to Australia in conditions that must have been a lot less comfortable. It ended its days as a gently rusting wool store in a bay in the Falkland Islands. Fortunately, after a lot of fund raising and effort it was brought back to Bristol, its spiritual home, and you can now go around and beneath it.
Well worth the trip. While it is sad to see the state of the vessel now, which must be mostly rust, it is very encouraging to see the work being done to keep it alive, and the imagination shown in making a look round as interesting as possible. They even have an “Isambard Brunel” wandering around in full Victorian dress, sideburns and stovepipe hat that you can chat to.
The weather was very kind to us, and I took loads of pictures which will find their way onto these pages over time I’m sure.
Source Code Movie Review
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In between shopping and helping to build furniture we managed to fit in a trip to the movies. We’d been meaning to see “Source Code” for a while, and everyone was glad of the trip. There seems to be a glut of “mystic” movies at the moment, what with “The Adjustment Bureau” and that one with Robert De Niro I’ve forgotten the name of.
Anyhoo, Source Code requires a bit of belief suspension, but once you get into it the film is really rather good. Everyone plays their part very well and the action zips along at a nice pace, with one or two twists along the way. Worth seeing.
