Getting your Xbox Live Avatar Image

This is me…

It turns out to be very easy to get hold of your Xbox Live Avatar in image form.  You can just put your gamertag into the following URL in place of TAG HERE:

http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/TAG HERE/avatar-body.png

This returns an image that you can then use anywhere you want a picture of your virtual self. Very nifty.

Rob at Mix 11 in Las Vegas

For those of you lucky enough to be going to Mix this year, I’ll be joining you as well.  I’m giving a session on Tuesday 12th of April at 11:30 am in Breakers D. The subject is “XNA Game Studio for Fun, Profit, Danger, Excitement and Windows Phone 7 Games”. There will be all new content, but all old jokes.

I’m also doing a booth session in the Windows Phone Booth (good name that) at 2:00 pm on the same day. Feel free to drop by and say hi. I’ll even sign copies of my book that you’ve bought….

Mega Open Day

This is some of the audience for our mega Open Day. Great turn out.

It is scary how fast time goes by. We are running towards the end of the  Open Days for this academic year. We are going out with a bang though, the turnout for today’s event was huge. This placed a certain amount of strain on the rooms that we have. We didn’t actually make the design lab bulge, but we came close. Thanks to everyone who came along, hope you had an interesting and enjoyable time with us.

As usual we gave away a copy of my book as a price, here is Warren handing it over. Note that we have now got some copies of the latest version (in all the shops now).

Find out if you are using the Windows Phone Emulator

It is often useful in a Windows Phone program for the code to know whether or not it is running on a real device.  It is actually easy to do this:

1. Add Microsoft.Phone to the references to your project if it is not already there.
2. Put the following line at the top of your program.
   using Microsoft.Devices;
3. You can now write code like this:
   if (Microsoft.Devices.Environment.DeviceType ==
                                                                              DeviceType.Device)
   {
       // we are running on the real phone
   }

You can use DeviceType.Emulator in the test to see if you are running on the emulator.

Some Windows Phones Contain NASA Chips

Sadly, my phone just contains ordinary chips…. such is life.

It turns out that your Windows Phone 7 device might be worth a lot more than you think, if it contains custom, radiation hardened memory chips, mistakenly installed when it was built.  Apparently, because the part numbers of the memory chips only differ by an H (for hardened) production plants put the highly valuable devices into a number of Windows Phone devices when they were made.

Ivan Felfrit, NASA spokesman, is saying that these chips were originally destined for the next generation of Mars Rovers, Spirit II and Opportunity IV. “We need several sets urgently” he said earlier today, “We have to test the programs on genuine hardware and we also need the devices for endurance testing”. NASA are happy to give you a replacement phone and 10,000 dollars if you have a device with these components inside. They have advanced surface mount labs where they can remove them and install them in Mars Rover prototypes.

To find out if your phone has the chips in it, just to to Settings->About and touch “More Information”. You should see the screen above. If the Chip SOC version is set to 0:36.2.0 you have the NASA chips. Mine above only has 0.36.2.6, which is the standard devices. Either chip works fine, it is just that the NASA ones are worth more, and might be going to Mars. If you think you might have the NASA chips, send an email to i.felfrit@wp7formars.com and he will get right back to you.