Hello Bulgaria

I’m giving a couple of sessions at MSDays in Sofia in Bulgaria at the end of March. You can find out more and even book your place at the conference (assuming you are Bulgarian) here:

http://www.msbgregistration.com/

There is also a Facebook group:

http://www.facebook.com/MSDays

I’ve even had a write up in couple of Tech News web sites in Bulgaria:

http://technews.bg/article-20532.html

http://news.expert.bg/n331344/

This is part of one of them…..

Специален гост в сесията за разработка на игри ще е и Роб Майлс, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP). Той е лектор в Hull University във Великобритания. Преподава програмиране, софтуерен инженеринг и вградени системи. На „Дни на Майкрософт” ще говори за Windows Phone и платформата за разработка на игри XNA.

If anyone can read this, I’d love to know what it says. I hope it is nice. It looks like Rob Miles in Bulgarian is Роб Майлс. Whatever. I’m very impressed that I could just cut and paste the text off the web site and into the blog and it all just works. You’ve gotta love UNICODE.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to travelling out to Sofia and giving a couple of sessions, one on Windows Phone development and another on the .NET Microframework.  Should be fun.

Platform Expos 2011 is coming

A date for your diaries folks. Sunday the 27th March 2011. That’s the day that Platform Expos 2011 is running. We had a meeting today about what we are going to do as part of the expo and it looks like it is going to be a really good gig. With 8 platforms on show, from Business through Culture to Education, there is a whole lot happening. We are going to be running another 24 hour mad game development to coincide with the event, and I’m going to be giving a session on Windows Phone game development. We will also be showing off the latest developments on Microsoft Kinect and home 3D technology.

You can find out more here:

http://platformexpos.com/index.html

The meeting was down at the World Trade Centre in Hull,  which has a fantastic view of the Humber Estuary and The Deep just outside.

 

The weather was a bit grey, but I did my best.

SyncToy and Drive Letter Setting Fun

At the end of the year I have to go through my marathon photo tidying up session. I keep all my writings and other important stuff on SkyDrive, Live Mesh and DropBox but there is just not room in the cloud for all the pictures that I take. And so this is the time when I go through the pictures directories of all my various machines and pull them all together to make a final, definitive set of all my photos that I can copy across a bunch of hard disks.

And when I’m doing this I find SyncToy very useful. I can use it to bring together files from lots of different disks and also make sure that two disks hold exactly the same set of files. It doesn’t seem to mind being pointed at directories that hold many gigglebytes of files and I can just leave it to get on with the work.

Oh, and when I’m using external drives I find it very useful to be able to make sure that when I plug the drive in it gets exactly the same drive letter each time. You can do this using the Disk Management tool. Open up Control Panel and then for “Disk Management” Then open the scary “Create and format hard disk partitions” option to bring up the Disk Manager tool:

Select the drive that you want in the list of volumes and right click it. Then select “Change Drive Letter and Paths..” to bring up the Change dialog box.

Then click Change and nominate the letter that you want to use in the combo box on the right:

Once you have done this you just click OK down all the menus and, presto, your drive has the letter you chose. And even better, the letter is remembered for next time you plug the drive in. Great stuff.

Dilbert Déjà Vu

Got a new Dilbert calendar on Saturday. Now, I’m quite keen on recycling in general, but less impressed when it extends to the cartoons….

Pretty Crashes

My mouse went bonkers today and contrived to take my computer down in a very interesting way. The picture shows that sometimes even a crash can look quite good….

Boggle Flash Game Review

Found this today on sale cheap and just had to buy a copy (although I prefer the phrase “invest in” rather than “buy”.

Very clever hardware has been shoehorned into five little battery powered boxes. Each shows a particular letter and when you put them in a row that makes a valid word you hear a beep and the game gives you some points. There must be a bunch of little radio serial ports and some RFID devices inside that let the blocks work out where they are, along with quite a reasonable sized dictionary.

Of course number one wife cares little about how it works, but she does enjoy playing the game, as do I. Well worth the investment. Comes with a nice little box you can carry the letters round in, along with some rather good party play modes.

Update on 2011-01-11 09:45 by Rob

One slight issue that we have noticed though is that the game seems to be fitted with an american dictionary. Which means that it is happy to accept words like "favor" and the like. This is a tad annoying, in that we bought what we thought was an english product (in all senses of the word).

Still fun though.

Running Ruby on Windows Phone

Ruby on Windows Phone

If you are interested in modern languages you have got to get this for your Windows Phone.  For a mere two pounds you get a Ruby runtime and editor which lets you create and run programs on the device itself. Let me be clear about this; it means you can create brand new programs and store and run them on your phone, without using a PC or anything else. Astonishing.

The installation comes with a bunch of programs including a Twitter client and a passable Tetris clone.

I’ve not played with Ruby much, but I’m always fancied having a go,  and now I have the perfect platform. You can find out more at http://www.iron7.com/

Wonderful Adobe Reader

Does anyone know why Adobe Reader still does this? And why it takes so long? And why the document looks rubbish when it has finished? And why the message is wrong, even though it has been been wrong for the last few versions of the stupid program? (all of which have a stupidly laborious upgrade procedure)

There. I feel much better now…. Oh, hang on, the reader has just crashed..

Update on 2011-01-06 13:43 by Rob

And yes, I have spotted the irony of just having distributed a PDF version of the Windows Phone Blue Book.

Helpful instructions?

Why not just put the instructions on both sides?

Windows Phone Blue Book Pdf

As well as getting a copy of my Windows Phone from Microsoft Faculty Connection you can also now get the text in pdf form from http://www.csharpcourse.com/ where it is displayed alongside my other coloured text books. You can also get the sample code there as well.

No Coffee Blues

Went into work today (after getting up at what seemed to be the middle of the night and scraping ice off the car for the first time in a week) to find that the coffee room was closed and both coffee machines in our building were broken. And I had a big pile of marking to do.

Wah.

Rewind and Reset

Buster clock by Sally Prangley. Use your deductive skills to work out what time the picture was taken….

Now that everyone has gone home we can spend some time putting our lives back together ready for the Bright Prospect of the New Year (tm). I even washed the cars, so at least they will be clean underneath the layer of dirty they will undoubtedly acquire tomorrow…

Shazam and Zune Pass can damage your street cred.

I heard a tune on the radio that I quite liked this morning, so I used the amazing Shazam program on Windows Phone to find out what it was, and then downloaded it onto the phone for free using my Zune Pass. I thought this was quite impressive.

How was I to know it was Kylie Minogue?

New Year Resolution

My first New Year resolution is not to make any jokes about monitors and pixels on January the first. Absolutely not.

New Years Eve Sheep Shearing

We’ve played a bunch of silly games over the last few days, what with having company and all. One of my favourites was this one from Lego. It is very simple to understand, and you can be quite nasty to your fellow players which is great fun.

A happy New Year to all (both?) my readers.

Christmas Sales?

We went up town today in search of bargains. To be honest, I didn’t find a lot that impressed. Although we did manage to fill the back of the car somehow..

Full House

We have got a bunch of folks over for the New Year, and a mini-reprise of Christmas. That meant even more presents to unwrap, which was rather nice.

Fit to Write

Feeling a bit better today. I managed to spend a chunk of time going through the chapters for the next book. According to Amazon it will be available at the end of next month. Scary.

Great Ideas and Fevered Minds

Note to self. Computer game ideas that you have while lying in bed at three in the morning trying to get to sleep are not actually as great as they seem at the time.  Assuming you can remember them.

Christmas Bug

From this….

… to this in one festive season. Well done number one son.

Along with my presents it seems I’ve also acquired a “Christmas Bug”. This pretty much laid me out today, so that I was reduced to lying in the back of the car and watching the frozen scenery go by as we rumbled home.