Reaching for XNA

We came across this issue in the lecture this afternoon. If you are using a machine which lacks really high performance graphics, perhaps because it has an on-board graphics display, you might get an error when you try to run an XNA program on it, because the graphics hardware can’t keep up.

If this happens you can try changing the Game Profile in the project settings for the game. If you set them to “Reach” this will reduce the demands that are made on the machine, and might make the game work.

It worked for me in the lecture….

Kinect and Windows Phone Demos

You can find all the Kinect demos and presentation materials on Skydrive here. I hope they work for you…

Imagine Cup Live Meetings

If you are thinking about entering the Imagine Cup (and you should be) then I’m hosting a couple of Live Meetings next week which will tell you all about the early stages:

Session 1 -  5:00 pm GMT  Tuesday 21st February

https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/zaaz1com/meet/FB7G74

Session 2 – 7:00 am GMT Wednesday 22nd February

 https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/zaaz1com/meet/D4Z68P

These are the times and the links to the Live Meetings themselves. Both meetings have the same content, come to the one that best fits your schedule.

If you have any interest in the competition then please come along. There’s still plenty of time to form a team and get cracking.

Final Tech Days Session Fun

This is the last shot of an audience for a while. Unless I decide to take a picture of the students at the C# lecture on Monday…

Did my final Windows Phone session today, just a few hours after I’d finished the Kinect one. I’d been assigned the “World Forum” theatre, which as you can see is pretty large. But there were enough folks there to make it look fairly full, and they were a great audience. A 75 minute session is quite a long time. I’ve been to shorter movies. Thank you all for paying attention and staying awake, in spite of the session being directly after lunch…

Every. Demo. Worked. (mostly)

Did my Kinect session first thing this morning, which was nice because it meant I had ages to set up. So I tested all the demos and they all worked. The only problem we had was with the “Kinect Kiss Detector”, which considering the audience demographic that you see above is not surprising.

Every. Demo. Failed.

A big audience to fail in front of….

What do you do when you present a session and every demonstration fails? I didn’t know this until today. The answer is that you reach the end and then you go and find out why.

I was doing a Kinect session for Geek Night today. This was kind of ambitious, what with carrying the sensor around all over the place. So I’d tested everything before I set off, and I was confident that it would all work on the night.

It didn’t.

I was very happy when the first demo worked, but I can’t take too much credit for that because it was the demonstration application that ships with the SDK. As soon as I moved onto my code that problems began. Programs that just worked suddenly locked up before my eyes. All of them.

It took me a while to figure out what had happened. As in the case of most big failures, it was a collection of little things that added up to make a catastrophe. First thing was that I was using my lovely little Alienware netbook rather than the “Big Ole Dell” that I usually use. The main reason I took the Alien was that it made room in the case for the Kinect sensor. That and the way the keyboard lights up. It is just powerful enough to run the demos, but just powerful enough is fine. Except today it wasn’t.

Something has mysteriously turned all my overclocking settings back down to normal. I turned them on ages ago when I got the device and forgot all about them. Today, after a lot of head scratching, I checked in the BIOS and there they all were. Back where they shouldn’t be.

A bit of tweakage and all is well. I’ve even tried flipping to the built in high performance graphics, which also helps (but also breaks the Windows Phone emulator – so I don’t usually use it).

I’m kicking myself for not testing the demos on site this afternoon when I had a bit of free time, but I assumed that since they worked before they’d work again.

Oh well. Everybody at the session seemed to have a good time. Except me.

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.

PlayStation Vita

Apparently it is called a PlayStation Vita because of the associations with speed and life. I must admit the name makes me thing of crisp-bread. And I wasn’t going to get one. Oh  no. With a phone and a Nintendo DS 3D I couldn’t see a reason to own the device. Until I saw it running.

The graphics are very impressive. Like very, very impressive. It really is a PS3 you can carry around with you. I had a go at Ridge Racer (I think I’ve bought that game more times that I’ve bought different copies of Star Wars) and the presentation and graphics were excellent. And I got a cool pair of (surprisingly good) blue headphones as well.

For casual games phones and iPads are great. For something a bit different and the 3D effect the Nintendo DS 3D has a lot to offer. But for hard core gamers I reckon the PS Vita has an awful lot going for it.

Open Day at Hull

Open Days are here again. This is some of the audience who sat through my talk this afternoon. Hope you all had a good time and thanks for braving the elements to come and see what we do at Hull. We are holding more Open days in the next few weeks.

This is Warren handing out a copy of a great book (Oh Yes) to the winner of the prize draw at the end. Those that came along also took home a printed copy of the C# Yellow Book. If you want to find out more about that, and perhaps download other coloured books, you can find them at www.csharpcourse.com

Kinect Fun Labs at Imagine Cup

There is a rather interesting new addition to the ranks of the Imagine Cup competitions this year. The Kinect Fun Labs Challenge is out to get you exploring new ways to use the Kinect sensor. The nice thing about it is that at the moment all you need is the idea. The implementation can come later. They are actually giving out 100 Kinect for Windows sensors (these are the special ones that have higher resolution close up and other interesting tweaks) to the ideas they like the best, so that you can realise them and enter the next phase of the competition. Next week there is a Live Meeting all about how it works. If I was still a student, I’d be there.

Go see “The Artist”

The Artist is a comedy drama about a falling silent star and a rising talking one. Sort of “A Star is Born” but in black and white, with hardly any speech, and no Barbra Streisand.  But there is a dog.

I liked it a lot. Touching, funny and with a heart. If you want a genuinely different cinema experience, you should get to see it.

Imagine Cup

We had a meeting today about the Imagine Cup. A whole bunch of our students seem very keen to take part. No idea why. Unless it is the chance to make a name for themselves, win some prizes, have fun making something useful, pick up useful skills, maybe even get to go to Australia and win a chunk of cash….

You should take part too. The Imagine Cup could change your life. I’ve seen it happen. Form a team and sign up here.

Kinect Skeleton Viewer

The new Kinect for Windows SDK is now available. It works really well, but they have changed the API slightly (generally it is a lot tidier now). If you want a simple program to get you started using the skeleton data I’ve done a quick conversion of one of the demos in the Kinect book that I’m working on. You can download the project from here. Now all I have to do is update all the other fifty or so demos and the 12 chapters. Lovely.

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.

Chris Wooding and the Ketty Jay

If you are looking for a bit of escapist Science Fiction/Fantasy stuff then take a look at Chris Wooding. I’ve just read the first of his Ketty Jay series and it is a rollicking good fun. If you enjoy Harry Harrison, Blake's Seven, Firefly kind of stuff then you’ll like this. A well written take on the “ship of misfits freebooting around falling into danger and adventure” kind of thing with plenty of action and a quite a few laughs.

Cameras and Lumps

Here’s a tip. If you are buying a digital camera which is not completely new, point it at a white piece of paper and take a photo. Then look at the result. The photograph will show you if there is any dirt on the sensor or the lens.

I didn’t do this today, which is why I had to take the camera back to the shop……..

Tutorials, Objects and References

We are doing objects and references in the First Year tutorial today. Great fun. Well, at least I thought so. I asked the class whether big objects in memory have larger references than small ones. They don’t – the size of the tag is always the same – no matter what it is connected to. I went on to explain that a reference tag contains a bunch of information about the thing it is referring to, including the type that it has, for example string, BankAccount, AlienSprite or whatever class you have created.

Then someone asked a great question: “What happens if the type has a very long name? Does the reference tag get bigger?”. Aha! What a great question. The answer is no. This is because the type of a reference is managed in terms of a reference from the tag to the type object that describes that reference. In other words, a reference to a BankAccount will also contain a reference to an object that describes the BankAccount class.

I was very pleased with this question, because it let me start to explain how, by using objects, you can build up structures of data that are genuinely useful. I’ve been explaining structures and objects all week and several times I’ve had the sensible question “What’s the point of objects and references? They just seem to make life harder for us.”  This little allows me to show how easy it is to use references to allow the system running the program to track and mange the type of the objects it is using.

I reckon that a good tutorial is when the students learn something. A great tutorial is when the tutor learns something as well. I’ve now got a lovely new example to use next year…