Profound Question

This has been bothering me. No, really. If the sun shines on a lump of red hot metal does it make the metal warmer?

Amsterdam Gets XNA

Had great fun today doing a session about XNA for DevDays. The audience were wonderful, and I took some happy snaps:

on the right...

...in the middle...

...and on the left

Thanks for paying attention people, and I hope you use XNA to get to some interesting places.

Before my talk we had a session from Dave Mitchell of Microsoft. He was able to tell us that the XNA Creators Club memberships are going to be part of Microsoft Academic Alliance. This is the best news. Now we can put a bunch of machines in our labs for people to write for and it won't cost us extra on top of our AA subscription. That news alone was worth going to Amsterdam for. If you are a member of a university faculty you owe it to yourself (and your students) to follow this up and get your hands on one of the best bargains in education at the moment).

Dave at the start of his presentation

Earlier today I went to a presentation by Scott Guthrie about Silverlight. This is a fantastic technology that lets you make very impressive user experience. It lets you put .NET powered behaviour into web pages and also gives you the Windows Presentation Foundation to drive your user interfaces. Excellent.

Scot talking about multiple language support in Sliverlight.

I've had a really good time in Amsterdam. I went out for a meal last night and took even more pictures:

Standard Canal picture

Artistic cake

There are some more on my Flickr site.

DevDays 2007

This morning found me boarding a plane for Amsterdam. I'm giving a session on XNA development tomorrow. Rather cleverly I didn't check in any luggage, so no waiting at conveyor belts for me. Rather less cleverly I'd also put my highly explosive shampoo and deodorant in my carry on bag. I managed to avoid the cavity search, but now I'm going to have to learn the Dutch for "Lynx Effect". Not that I seem to need it......

These two lovelies were wandering round the show accompanied by a bloke with a camera and printer strapped to him who was taking photos and printing them out for free. Very nice. Although the reason I look so pleased is that I'm clutching a copy of the Microsoft Mobile Developers Handbook. I wrote Chapter 13, which is about mobile graphics. I was stood in the bookshop reading my own printed words when the girls turned up. I resisted the temptation to hold up the pages and shout "Look, I wrote this!", since I figured they might not be that impressed.  But I settled for a picture.

DevDays is neat. It is based in Amsterdam at the conference centre there. I'll grab some pictures from inside the conference tomorrow. For today, here are some external shots.

Outside the Conference Centre

Authentic Dutch bike rider

On the way to the Netherlands

On the way to the Netherlands
Originally uploaded by RobMiles.

Adobe Steal another Half Hour

There goes another chunk of my life. Because the Adobe updater kicked in during a print this means that it broke the print operation and locked the file in the spool queue of the printer, which meant that I had to uninstall the printer, reboot and then reinstall it again.

Now, who do I send that bill to?