It’s not working

This is a test post for the Twitter plugin for Live Writer.

Update on Thursday, April 1, 2010 at 09:40AM by Rob

Hmm. It seems that editing a post which has a title containing quote (or perhaps other) strange characters causes the link generated by the Live Writer plugin to break. This is because such characters are removed from the post title when the update is put on the server.

Taking the Wrong Train Home

Waiting for the Wrong Train

After the fun and games last night it was time to pack up and go home. Having successfully negotiated the tram to the station I was feeling quite happy. I know the Dutch for “Schipol Airport” (it contains the word ‘Schipol’) , and having heard the announcer use the phrase in reference to the train on the platform I was quite happy to leap aboard in the confident expectation of going there. Unfortunately I don’t know the Dutch for “does not go to”, which meant that after 45 minutes or so I had to leap out of the train and find one that did.

Thanks to a very helpful lady who not only understood panic-stricken English but also knew where the right train was I was able to change direction and get to the airport in time for the flight.  I’m taking a phrase book next time…

Geek Night Files

My name in lights…

After the fun and games of Geek Night I’ve now put all the source files and the presentation up.

• You can find the presentation here.
• You can find all the sample code here.

There are also some more audience pictures on Flickr. Click on the picture above to find your way to my photostream and take a look. I’m off to find a tram, a train and a plane now…

World’s First Windows Phone Controlled Robot

Oscar, my tiny Micro Framework powered robot has become the other first robot to be controlled by a Windows Phone. Charlie Kindel was kind enough to take part in my demo and give the robot commands during the talk. Thanks for that.

I nearly didn’t make it work though, loading the wrong firmware into a device is never going to end well, but in the end all the components fitted together and a happy ending ensued. I’ll have more pictures, and the slide deck that explains how it all works, along with demo code, tomorrow.

This was the setup, you can see Oscar next to my laptop, the Micro Framework board I used as a web host is on the far left.  I also had my own router and WIFI access point so that I could get the phone onto my own private internet…

Update on Thursday, April 1, 2010 at 09:52AM by Rob

Clint tells me that this is not in fact the first Windows Phone controlled robot. I've ammended the title of the slide accordingly. You can find out about the other one here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2010/03/16/9979874.aspx

Also, because of problems with the updating of my original post I've had to delete it and make a new one, so some comments have been lost. Thanks for them though.

Devdays 2010 Windows Phone Game Development Talk.

Here is the content from my session. Thanks for being a great audience. This is actually the content from my TechDays 2010 Portugal session. I, ahem, overwrote the text in the original post. Sorry about that.

• 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.