Windows Phone Agents at Tech Days

Today I was up bright and early to fly out to the Netherlands for TechDays 2013. I’m doing some sessions on Windows Phone and Gadgeteer. I’ve been doing sessions in TechDays for quite a while, they have a great atmosphere at the conference and the audiences are always great.

Today was no exception. You can tell the quality of the audience by the questions that you get at the end, and in this session I got some really good ones. One of which I couldn’t answer at the time. The question concerned the behaviour of application created alerts. A Windows Phone program can create alerts which will appear at some point in the future. These are useful because you get them whether the application is running or not. When the alert fires the user can drop back to the application and do something. I made a program for timing eggs which causes an alert when the egg is ready. What the delegate wanted to know was what happened to the alert if the phone is displaying the lock screen, or powered off.

I’ve done some experiments , and now I think I know the answer. If the phone is locked the alert will appear on top of the lock screen, just like any other appointment would. If the phone is turned off, you don’t seem to get the alert displayed when it is powered back on though. Hope this helps.

You can find the slides and the sample code (including the egg timer) here.

Foggy Open Day

We had a bunch of folks come to see us today for an admissions open day. Thanks for braving the fog folks, hope you have a good journey back home.

I forgot to bring my “proper” camera in to work today to take the picture, and used my Lumia instead. The phone seems to have come out quite well in spite of this.

Alien Invasion

Lindsay and David, standing against each other’s names.

Today a couple of ex-Hull bods came to see us. They now both work for Boss Alien down in Brighton and they came up to give a talk about working as a game developer.

Great talk guys. The thing that came out most strongly for me was that if you want to get into the game you must have a good portfolio of your work to show off. This should include not just coursework assignments that you’ve completed, but also things you have done of your own. Make sure that this is easy to find on your website or blog and keep adding to it. It looks like there is plenty of work out there for good developers, make sure that you do a good job of showing off your skills.

Red Nose Day with Gadgets

I’m doing it again. For more money. If you want to see a show that has laughter, tears and pathos (and that’s just the hardware demos) then you should come along.

You should also sponsor me at: http://my.rednoseday.com/sponsor/robmiles

I’ve set the target really high, at 1,000 pounds. But if I get that much I will do the entire lecture wearing a tutu.

And just to let you know, I have sooo got the legs for a tutu.

Fog

“Fog is how nature keeps the frame rate up”