Day off in New Orleans

If you are going to have a day off, I can recommend New Orleans as a great place to do it. First we went off to Audobon Zoo, which has to be one of the best zoos I’ve ever been to. We expected to spend a few hours there, but we ended up finding a day’s worth of stuff to keep us busy. There were all the usual zoo favourites (pictures of which will filter onto the blog over time I’m sure) along with some local specialities.

There’s an alligator lurking in this picture somewhere, I suggest that until you know where, you should rule out any swimming.

In the evening we went on a riverboat cruise which was rather splendid. There is something extremely civilised about sitting drinking a cool beer while they move the scenery past you and tell you all about it. The Mississippi is a very busy river, with oil, sugar and all sorts of other things moving up and down in huge ships. 

Today we also had a rather good sunset as well.

Last Teched 2013 Show Day

This is the Windows Phone part of the exhibition, where I’ve been spending a few hours each day. The conference ends today, I’ll miss the smell of brand new carpet.

In the evening we went up to the Mercedes Benz Superdome for the TechEd 2013 attendee party. Lots of other folks went too. Fortunately this is a Very Big Place.

There was good food, good music and, most important of all, free beer.

Speechifying Applications at TechEd 2013

Did my final session for TechEd US today. Great fun and a lovely audience. You can find the demonstrations for the session here.

Windows Phone Agents Secrets at TechEd 2013

We started the day with a walk around the French Quarter, which was rather nice. Then it was time to head into TechEd and give my session on creating agents for Windows Phone. I was a bit worried, what with it being the last session on the day, but the audience was great and even seemed to like the “Everything Sound”. The slides will be on the TechEd site soon, I’ll post the link when I get it. You can find the demos from the presentation here.

Sorry about the lack of a picture of the audience, it was just too dark..

NavigationService.Navigate–Duh!

Thanks to Ginny for the photograph. And for suggesting on Twitter that I might need some new jokes.

As if.

Anyhoo, this morning found me on the Windows Phone booth extoling the virtues of Windows Phone development. I told the happy tale of my PlayMusic application (22K downloads so far), the future with VoiceMusic and the dire tale of Procrastination Challenge. The game they dare not sell.

I was showing how easy it is to make programs and how you can navigate smoothly from one Windows Phone page to another. And then I completely forgot how to do it. Wah. Fortunately, after opening an existing project I managed to find the line.

NavigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/GameOverPage.xaml",
                                                   UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute));

This takes you onto the GameOverPage. How one earth could I have forgotten that? Anyhoo, I finally got to the end and people were kind enough to clap, which was nice.

Thanks to a great bunch of folks who were good enough to sit and listen. Larry was kind enough to video the session. With a bit of luck nobody will ever see it.

If you want to find out the awful truth behind “Procrastination Challenge”, I’m doing some more sessions on the Windows Phone Booth later in the week. Drop by to find out when. We’re in Hall D.

Tomorrow I’m doing my first session, Secrets of using Agents on Windows Phone tomorrow afternoon at 5:00pm in Room 383, followed by a session at 6:30 on Ask the Experts.