Tidying Up

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

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

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:

http://www.robmiles.com/demos

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

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

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.