Best Joke Ever

I Tweeted this joke last week to riot of tumultuous indifference. I’m putting in the blog now, mainly so that I don’t forget it.

“I got fired from my job at the zoo because in meetings I would always mention the elephant in the room.”

The Evil of Block Copy: Volume 99

Can you tell what is wrong with this code?

if (DrawPosition.Contains(
        (int)location.Position.X,
        (int)location.Position.X) )
{

I can, but it took me a bit of head scratching….

Windows Phone Jump Start Still Jumping

 
Ryan, one of our satisfied customers wearing the T-shirt he won on the last jump start. Looking good…

We have had loads of hits on the Windows Phone Jump Start videos.  And we are planning another set of sessions in September, which will be bigger, brighter and bang up to date.  More details soon.

Saying Au-Revior to Concorde

Now, that’s what I call a flight deck.

We went to see Concorde at Filton today. I always feel a bit sad when we go over there. The plane is amazing but it doesn’t deserve to be stuck on the ground. It really should be out there doing what it does best, and what nothing on earth can do any more.

This time the affair was even more poignant because as of later this year the plane will not be open for visitors at all, which is really sad.

Anyway, I took the big camera and a selection of lenses and tried to get a few shots.

Not surprisingly the team at Bristol is very busy at the moment as people take their last chance to see the plane for a while, but if you can get yourself down there you won’t regret the trip.

Windows Phone Phone Calls

It will come as no surprise to you that your Windows Phone programs are interrupted when the phone rings. However, if you are running an XNA game at the time it will not actually stop. This will probably annoy your game player though, as once they come back from explaining that they don’t want any double glazing just right now they will probably find that all their lives have been lost and the game is over.

To get around this you should make your XNA game drop into pause mode when a call comes in. You can get notification of things like phone calls by binding to the Activated and Deactivated events.

this.Activated += 
                  new EventHandler<EventArgs>(Game1_Activated);
this.Deactivated += 
                  new EventHandler<EventArgs>(Game1_Deactivated);

You can get Visual Studio 2010 to do all the hard work here, just type “this.Activated +=” and then press Tab in response to the magic that happens next.  Then put code into the methods that are generated and away you go.

Note: This is not what happens if the player presses Windows or Back. In those cases your game program is stopped. But that is a subject for another post I think.