London Nokia Windows Phone Training

Heading for the Emirates Stadium.

Today we started what will be our last Nokia Training event for Windows Phone. This one was rather special though, being based at the Emirates Stadium, home of The Arsenal football team. As well as doing our training, a chance of a trip around the ground was in the offing.

They even had Arsenal branded WiFi access (this one has expired now…)

The Hallowed turf

Some of the delegates, more on Flickr. I’ll stitch a panorama when I get home, not got the software on the tiny laptop.

Free Beer in a football stadium, what could possibly go wrong…

We had some lively discussions and I hope everyone got something out of the day. In terms of resources I said I’d put up links to the content. Here we are:

You can get all the content, slide decks and more, from the Jumpstart web site here:

http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/wpmango/m/mediagallery/default.aspx

The ones you want are:

01 Mango Building Phone Apps
02 Mango Intro Silverlight
03 Mango Advanced Silverlight
05 Mango FastApp Switching
11 Mango XNA Winphone
12 Mango Selling applications

There are also other decks and samples you might find interesting. If you want to watch videos of Andy and myself delivering this content (and who wouldn’t) then you can find them on Channel 9 here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Mango-Jump-Start-01-Building-Windows-Phone-Apps-with-Visual-Studio-2010

You can find the Tidy ToDo application here. To use the WCF server project you have to have IIS installed on your machine and you must start Visual Studio in Administrator mode:

https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=a4ce6a659fd80c02&resid=A4CE6A659FD80C02!1482

If you want to learn C# from the same text that we teach our students with at Hull, take a look here:

www.csharpcourse.com

There is also a copy of the Windows Phone 7.0 Blue Book there, which has some background on phone programming that you might find useful.

Harry Harrison on Kindle

Riding on the train down to London today I was delighted to find that I can now get Harry Harrrison books for Kindle. Including the “Stainless Steel Rat” and my personal favourite “The Technicolor Time Machine”. One of the great questions of the age is “Why have no Harry Harrison books been made into films yet?”. His stuff reads like movie scripts in many ways and is just so darned well written and amusing that it really should be on the big screen.

If you like fast moving Sci-Fi with a humorous twist then you should get a one of his books and have a read. I’d recommend “The Stainless Steel Rat” for starters. Great fun.

Open Day Woo Hoo

This was a great audience. I even had folks going “Woo Hoo” whenever I said robmiles.com….

We had our first University Open day on campus today. Great fun and an amazing turnout. By the time I started talking we had the whole lecture theatre full. Thanks so much for coming, I hope that the trip was worth it. Sorry about the jokes…

Anyhoo, if you did come – or if you didn’t – here are some useful links

www.csharpcourse.com will take you to the C# Yellow Book pages. You can download our complete First Year text from there as a PDF. Come to Hull on an admissions visit and we’ll give you a printed copy.

www.destructiongolf.com is the site for our first 24 hour programming competition. It includes a link to the 360 magazine article that was written about the event.

www.threethinggame.com is the site for our second competition. This includes videos from all the teams about their entries.

www.wherewouldyouthink.com is the site for admissions, I’ll be updating this soon with departmental news and other stuff.

Goodbye Steve Jobs

I was taking a tutorial with the First Year this morning and I was talking about how difficult it is to make something that is easy to use. When you try to add a feature to make things “easier” for the user you often find that you have made your life as an engineer much more difficult. And then I thought of Steve Jobs, who passed away yesterday. He was legendary for giving his engineers hell. When they thought something was “good enough” he would refuse to accept it, repeatedly rejecting solutions that other companies would have shipped as “good enough”.  He ended up with products that were truly delightful to use, and by starting with the person and making the technology fit, rather than vice-versa he moved things on into new places time and time again. And his engineers loved him for it, because he got them to make things that they never believed they could. We will not see his like again.

If you want to read about the way he drove Apple to make the Macintosh and get a feel for the way he worked in those early days, I can recommend West of Eden.

Teaching and Partying at Hull

Did a 13 hour day today. And reminded myself why I love this job. Bunch of teaching on our new hardware modules, then a first year lecture, then a slew of project meetings, then the Postgraduate Party. This was another quiz and video game frenzy which kept me at work until 9:30 pm, but was great fun. Thanks to the Systems team for setting up both parties with speed and efficiency and to Simon for the scary picture quiz that has now got to be an annual feature.

The winning team with their big box of sweets

These guys came second.

These guys got to take away the coveted “White Chocolate Bar of Power”.

Another big day tomorrow.