Windows Phone Mixer

Free food and drink? In  a brewery? Sign me up…..

After the exertions of the day we went out to the Windows Phone Miser at a really nice little brewery. The place was just nicely full with Windows Phone Developers and folks and we sat around chatting, drinking the excellent cloudy light beer and eating free food, my favourite kind.

The guys at the bar insisted I took this picture.

Then we trundled back to the hotel on all the right trains. Great fun.

TechEd 2010 Day 3

We finally got some good weather for photographs today. Even the traffic looks good….

…as does the conference centre.

I did my session at 12:00 today, loads of people turned up. I hope you all had a good time. I pointed my camera at the audience as usual…

This is just some of he multitude. Thank you all for coming. It was fun, especially the bit were my demo failed because I had commented one of the statements out……

As I promised, you can download all the demos from here.

If you want to get started you can find links to everything, including the JumpStart videos that Andy and I did, here:

http://create.msdn.com

I’m on again tomorrow morning at 9:00 am, bright and early, giving Phone XNA games plenty of Whizz and Bang. Should be fun.

Tech Ed 2010 Day 2

I wonder if they’ll let me take it home…

When is a phone not a phone? When you get it brand new on Friday and forget to enable international roaming before you go to Berlin on Sunday. Although my shiny new phone does work very well on WiFi and since just about nobody knows my new number it is not as if I’m missing out on many calls.

Anyhoo, spent another day writing today, including 25 multiple choice questions for the second year Software Development course.  Such lucky students…..

I also went along for the Tech Check for my sessions tomorrow and Thursday. These are where we plug everything together and see if it works. It all did, which bodes well for the future. The girl who manages one of the rooms said that she was really excited when she found out that one of the speakers was from Hull. Which was very nice, although I did wonder out loud whether she might not think about getting out a bit more. My firsts session is tomorrow at 12:00 in Hall 7.1b, London 2. It is all about Building Windows Phone Games. Should be fun.

TechEd 2010 Day 1

Where all the cool kids are hanging out. And me.

Number one wife asked me how I was enjoying TechEd. The truth is I love these gigs. It only takes the smell of brand new carpet tiles to get me in the mood for some conference action. Although I seem to have spent most of today in the Speakers Lounge writing stuff.

I got up bright and early and wandered to the station to catch the train from the hotel to the conference centre. The carriage was full of delegates clutching their bags and so I knew I was headed in the right direction. The conference centre is huge. It was big last year, but it seems to have grown a couple of extra wings and a whole new set of routes around. I usually manage to get where I want to go, but I’ve never gone the same way there twice.  I wandered into the Speakers Lounge again and met up with a few familiar faces and then settled down to work. Towards the end of the day I headed down to the conference floor and the busiest part, which seemed to be the bit around the Windows Phone stand. HTC were also there demonstrating their extensive range of phones and they all look very nice.

I’ve been lent an HTC HD7 for the demos in my sessions and I must admit to being pretty smitten with the device. It has a huge screen and shiny buttons, plus a really stylish kick stand that lets you stand it on the desk to watch videos. Great stuff. I’ve seen pretty much all the devices on sale now and I reckon there isn’t a bad one amongst them. Just different kinds of lovely.

TechEd 2010 Speaker Lounge in Berlin

Made it to Berlin for TechEd 2010. They have these letters set up on the wall of the speaker lounge. Just crying out for anagrams. They’ve told me if I come up with any good ones they’ll let me put them up…