Getting Students Started in the Windows Phone Marketplace

Getting started as a student in Windows Phone marketplace is actually quite easy, but there are one or two issues that you need to be aware of, and best practices to follow to make sure that you get going as quickly as possible. If you know how to do stuff the two issues that you need to be aware of are very simple:

• The validation of your account only starts once you have submitted an application for approval.
• You can only unlock a Windows Phone device once you have submitted an application for approval.

The bottom line here is that the first thing you must do when you have registered is submit an application for approval. Think of this as a “placeholder” that will move you through the process. You can remove it from sale later.

If you are an experienced Windows Phone developer this should be no problem. If you are not submitted before the process is simple enough, and to make it even easier I’ve made a tiny screencast that goes through it for you. In this I make a brand new application from scratch and then show how it would be submitted for approval. If you just copy what I do you can be sorted in around half an hour or so.

You can download and view the video here:

Windows Phone Marketplace Walkthrough

Note: The application that I submit during the screencast hasn’t appeared in the Marketplace yet. I’ll let you know when it does…

The King’s Speech

The King’s Speech is a great film. Colin. Firth. Must. Get. An. Oscar. Apparently Queen Elizabeth has seen the film and is of the opinion that it is OK. It must have been strange for the queen to see herself portrayed as a child in the film. Especially when she saw that her sister was actually that irritating little girl from “Outnumbered”.

The film tells of a man who was not born to be king but had greatness well and truly thrust upon him, in spite of being stuck with a terrible stammer. His wife finds him an unconventional speech therapist and the resulting collision of cultures is a great thing to watch. This is just a nice, uplifting film with a great cast and visuals that captures the spirit of the times beautifully. I’m not totally convinced that everyone was exactly as they are portrayed in the film, but that is by the by. Go and see it.

Get Your Windows Phones at Hull University

Quite a few students at Hull now have Windows Phones, which is nice. They are also writing games for them and Imagine Cup entries. Which is even nicer. If you are a student at Hull and you want a phone to play with I can lend you one for a little while. This offer is only open to people who turn up at my office and show me some neat stuff on the emulator, and I can’t let you keep the phones (shame) because we need them for teaching later in the semester. However, they should be useful to people who are stuck for a way of testing their program on a real device.

Later this month I’m going to run some “Bring Out Your Living” Windows Phone sessions on Wednesday afternoon where anyone can turn up with a XAP file and we can try them on a device and see what happens.

Oh, and if you want to make your Windows Phone work on the exchange server on campus the settings are:

Server: exfs.adir.hull.ac.uk

Domain: adir

Server Requires Encrypted (SSL) connection: ticked

Find your way to the advanced settings when the standard ones take you there. Use your university username and password and it should all work fine.

XNA 4.0 Book Now Available

The latest version of my XNA book, XNA Game Studio 4.0: Learn Programming Now! has just been released.  It must be good, it has an exclamation mark in the title!

The book contains content updated for Visual Studio 2010 and XNA 4.0. It also contains three chapters about Windows Phone game development, so you can take your XNA skills and show them off on the phone.

Bubblegum for Windows Phone pictures and Good Advice

Bubblegum is a new program for Windows Phone 7 (and coming to other platforms they say) that lets you take pictures and share them with your chums on Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. The application also has some very “hipsteresque” (if that is a proper word) filters that you can apply to the pictures before you send them. These make you look even more artistic and interesting.  As a true artist, I have of course posted a few of my own. My name on Bubblegum is, unsurprisingly, RobMiles it you want to take a look.

The program is free, and fun. It was written by a couple of folks from Microsoft who are also a couple, if you see what I mean. Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan have done a super job in making a nice little program which does the job with flair and humour. Sriram Krishnan even has a blog. Everyone should read his “Stuff I’ve learned at Microsoft post”. Great stuff.

http://www.sriramkrishnan.com/blog/