TechDays 2010 Portugal Session Resources

ACA009 Creating Windows Phone Games

Here is the content from my session. Thanks for being a great audience.

• Slide Deck
• Demo1: DamageCalc Silverlight Application
• Demo2: PatternMatch Silverlight Game
• Demo3a: StarLight XNA Game using XNA Accelerometer Emulation 
• Demo03b: Windows XNA “Game” Serving Gamepad accelerometer
• Demo04: WP7 Phone XNA Multi-touch Piano
• Demo05: WP7 XNA 3D Triangle Drawing
• Demo06: WP7 XNA Particle System

The code works on the current version of the CTP for the Windows Phone system. You can download this from here. If you want to use demo 3B to serve out accelerometer information to your phone app make sure that the program is running with Administrator privileges, and that you have modified the URL in the Phone Starlight program to address this host (localhost should just work).

If you want to get started with Windows Phone you can find a list of useful lines (and some FAQ entries) here.

ACA004 Giving Robots Life with the .NET Micro Framework

I left Oscar the robot powered up overnight by mistake. I was very impressed to find that he still had plenty of battery power left this morning. Fortunately nobody had been sending movement commands to him via the secret URL otherwise he could have gone anywhere!

• Slide Deck
• Demo 01: A Robot Coward
• Demo 02: A Robot Coward with a Kill Switch and Lights
• Demo 03a: Micro Framework Web Host
• Demo 03b: Fez Micro Robot controller
• Demo 03C: WP7 Windows Phone Silverlight App to control a robot

If you want to get hold of a robot and Fez controllers you can go to:

http://www.tinyclr.com/

If you want to get hold of the Web Server board you can go here:

http://devicesolutions.net/Products/Tahoe.aspx

If you want the most powerful Micro Framework board I’ve ever seen you can go here:

http://www.ghielectronics.com/product/125

The Micro framework at Microsoft can be found here. There are links to platform manufacturers and a very useful forum. You can even propose enhancements to the platform.

http://www.microsoft.com/netmf/default.mspx

TechDays 2010 Session Fun and Games

My desktop setup. A robot, a PC doing desktop sharing, another PC running a video call and a final Micro Framework device running a web server. And it all worked. Eventually.

Thanks to everyone in the audience, and Luis for setting everything up. I wasn’t in Lisbon, but thanks to cunning camera work and a nice fast network I got as close as I could. I could even see the audience on my screen (which probably freaked a few people out at the start).

We had the audience hitting web sites that caused my programs back in Hull to hit breakpoints (which must be the largest debugging session ever). And then I let the everyone out there send commands to Oscar the robot who, right on cue, tried to jump off the desk.

The audience were fantastic. As usual from Portugal. Thanks for taking the event in such good sprit folks.

To try and make everyone feel at home, and add some “TechDays 2010 Portugal” flavour I did up the office wall behind my chair…

Luis during the, slightly fraught, setup.

Some of the audience at the start of the talk.

Thanks folks. That was the best conference I’ve never been to….

I mentioned in the talk that I’m going to assemble some resources for Windows Phone and .NET Micro framework. I am, but I’ll put them up tomorrow. Off to bed now….

Ash Stranded

I had everything ready. My bags were packed and I’d heard on the TV last night that they were reopening all of the airports. Thing is, KLM hadn’t heard this.

And so I’m not going to Portugal. So, I’m going to have to bring a little bit of Portugal to my office tomorrow and beam my sessions at TechDays from Hull. Whatever else, it will be interesting.

HEY Girl Geeks at Hull

The Girl Geek movement in Hull is going from strength to strength. Their next event is on May 4th. You can find out more here. They also have a Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/HEYGGD

Super Speedy

Got switched over to my new “Super Speedy” broadband today. This should have increased my browsing speed, it has definitely increased the rate at which money is taken from my bank account.

After some tests I find I have a speed up factor of around 6 or so, but this was coming from a very poor starting position. The next thing to do is try twiddling with the router and the cables to see if I can improve on this.