Rob on Channel 9

If you want to watch any of the sessions that I recorded during my recent “World Tour” you can find them all nicely indexed on Channel 9:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Speakers/rob+miles

This even includes my Windows Phone Lecture in Rhyme, which is at least as much fun as it sounds. If you watch them all you can count how many times the same jokes come round…..

iPad 2 for Mad-ness

I really like my iPad 2. I bought it because I am always a sucker for the sales assistant saying “It’s the last one we have in stock”. And because I’d seen one. It is a very well realised device.The funky magnetic cover, whilst amazingly expensive (even by the standards of Amazon Kindle cases) does a very good job of providing a stand and protection, and the way you can turn the device off just by covering it is very neat.

I’m not keen on the way that you have to use iTunes to set it up and get things onto it, but I’m just about prepared to put up with this, even to the point of keeping a Mac lying around just to look after the iPads in our household. I reckon the secret of iTunes success is to run it on a Mac. My experiences with iTunes on the PC have never been good, and woe betide you if you ever try to remove iTunes from a PC. Actually, I do know how to do this, the first step is to reformat the PC and re-install Windows.

But I digress. If you do have an iPad there are a couple of programs that I’ve found very useful. The first is PDF Reader Pro which does a very good of rendering PDF files, which you can transfer to the iPad using the dread iTunes. Some time ago I bought Absolutely Mad, which is DVD filled with 50 years worth of Mad Magazine, all as scanned PDFs. The iPad is wonderful for reading this, so now I can carry around a few years worth of Mad for reading. I’ve just noticed that you can get National Lampoon on the same kind of thing, which is nice.

The second useful program is AVPlayerHD, which lets me carry around a few episodes of Veronica Mars wherever I go without having to fill up memory with large video files. This has very good presentation and lots of options you can use to make even highly compressed stuff look as presentable as possible.

Update on Tuesday, May 31, 2011 at 09:20AM by Rob

Just discovered that you can get Star Trek, the complete comic book collection, in PDF on DVD rom from Amazon.com for 17 dollars. Very tempting...

Just when you are waxing philosophical…

Thanks to Joey deVilla for the link

Where did they find a cat that big?

Windows Phone Mango

The latest development tools for Windows Phone are now available for download. They are very good. There are lots of extra features, and a really nice new emulator which does location and accelerometer emulation.

I reckon that Microsoft stuff tends to get really interesting around the third version. MSDOS 3.0 was the first one that really worked well, Windows 3 was the one where things got really interesting, the third’ish version of Windows NT (NT 4.0) was rather good and so on. By the time the development team get to version 3 they have got all the core behaviours out of the way and can move on to the interesting stuff that they really wanted to do when they started.

Mango is the third version of the Windows Phone software.  This is really impressive, in that the phone itself has not been out for a year yet, and the first set of development tools only appeared just over a year ago.

While you can’t get your hands on hardware yet, thanks to the emulator support you can start to write programs that take advantage of the new features, which include background processing, combined Sliverlight and XNA applications, on-board database, sockets support and lots of other goodies.

You can get the SDK here. One thing you might need to do first is install Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 – which you can find here. (this actually took longer to install than the SDK for me).

There are also loads of new examples which you can find here

I must admit I find Mango really exciting. If you want to see some videos of the new consumer features (neat things you’ll be able to do with the phone soon) then take a look here.

Twitter Revision Experiment

I’m trying a tiny experiment today. The 08120 Programming 2 exam is tomorrow, and I’ve invited anyone with C# revision questions to tweet them with the tag #08120Revision. If I find them, I’ll answer them as best as I can in 140 characters….