Windows Phone Foamies for Everyone

The parcel I thought was books turned out not to be. Instead it was packed full of Windows Phone Foamies that Stephanie had sent over for my Red Nose Day Lecture in Rhyme next week.

All this after a dangerous and expensive trip to Sheffield to pick up the parcel. Dangerous because I undertook some dodgy satnav-inspired lane changes and expensive because we stopped off at Meadowhall on the way back.

Anyhoo, I think I can say with confidence that if you come along on Friday there is a very good chance that you will get a foamie. As long as you put some cash in the bucket. I’ve also found out that I’m getting some real, non-foam, Windows Phones from a Very Generous Microsoft to give out. One will be given to a random person chosen from my list of donors on:

http://my.rednoseday.com/robmiles

Give me some cash and you could be on track to get a phone of your own. (you see, I’m getting into the rhyming spirit already). Now, if only I could find something that rhymes with “Silverlight”.

Kinect and Midi at Platform Expo

Laurie Welton of Home Sweet Home checking out the Kinect interface.

Spent an hour or so down at the KC Stadium today marking out our territory for the Platform Expo that is happening in just over a fortnight. I’ve taken a Kinect driver from Code Laboratories and some sample MIDI code and we are going to make something that lets you control the music playback and video show using your body as the controller.  I’m working with Tom Watkins and Laurie Welton of Home Sweet Home who fancied having a play with this stuff.

Great fun. We’re linking the MIDI signals to Ableton Live audio and Resolume video systems. I’ve not played with MIDI for ages, it seems to have come on a bit…

Anyhoo, I’m doing something which might be interesting, where we are using video images to perform the MIDI mapping . This should make it really easy to design “human user interfaces” for use during different performances.

This is the first version of the program that we tested, and it even mostly worked.  If you want to see it in action, come on down to the Expo at the KC Stadium on 28th of March. That’s the same day as the final of our Three Thing Game contest, which will also be taking place during the expo. Almost as if we’d planned it that way. We’ll have lots of Nintendo 3Ds machines around and there are talks and demonstrations of 3D in entertainment and games, I’m doing a Kinect workshop. There are lots of other platforms and sessions and demos and really good stuff. And there will be lasers.

Robs Red Nose Day Game Takes Shape

Now with added Nose Images and High Score

The Red Nose Day game is coming along quite well. For something I started at 2:00am in the morning last week while jetlagged it is actually progressing in a reasonable manner. Some time back I read a very good interview with Jordan Mechner, the man behind “Prince of Persia”.

He said some very sensible things about game development and one point he made really resonated with me today. He said that it was OK to play around with ideas and mess about with your game until you find out what it is really about. Once you have got your central game theme sorted you must then build on that like crazy. And you must defend your idea against all.

Up until today I’d got some bits and pieces moving around the screen and some text drawing and screen swapping code, but I didn’t really know what the game was about. But now I do. I’m not saying it is going to be awesome. But it is going to be quite fun.

I’m hoping to finish all the bits and pieces, add some music and get the game into Windows Phone Marketplace by the end of the week so that everyone can get a copy and play with it on their Windows Phone, and donate lots of cash to Comic Relief.

/RedNoseDay

Definitely Not Fixed

We had another Open Day today. And another Prize Draw. The winner of the copy of my book, pictured above, had the surname Miles. This was not fixed. Not at all.

Note: Eagle eyed readers will of course have spotted that the book above is for version 2.0 of XNA, not the more recent version 4.0. This is because it seems that the copies of my Version 4.0 book are presently in a warehouse near Sheffield, waiting for me to go and pick them up. This is thanks to a particularly shy delivery company who don’t seem to want take the package to anywhere that might have someone able to receive it. Mr. Miles will get his proper version of the book sent through as soon as we have got hold of ours.

Wearing a Jacket Might Make You Nasty

I’ve started wearing a jacket for work. I’ve been referred to as “dapper” twice over the last week. Very nice. However, I’ve found that it has made me slightly more nasty. In lectures I’m now trying to stop people from talking as much at the back, and generally getting folk to turn up on time and take part. This doesn’t seem to be a case of “clothes maketh the man” as such, but it does seem that clothes maketh the man slightly more grouchy.

Or perhaps it is the jetlag.

Sign up now for Three Thing Game

Three Thing Game is a game development competition being run for students by the University of Hull. It will run for the week starting 21st March . The final will be on Sunday 27th March at the Platform Expo event, after a 24 hour intense programming session on Hull University campus the night before.

http://platformexpos.com/

The games will be written using XNA for Windows PC, Xbox 360 or Windows Phone 7. Microsoft are sponsoring the event and providing Windows Phone 7 devices for each team member as prizes.

If you are a student at Hull and want to form a team sign up (and you really should) you can find out more here:

http://www.threethinggame.com/

Red Nose Day and Windows Phone Fun

I’m doing another Lecture in Rhyme for Red Nose Day, March 18th.

The lecture will be all about Windows Phone Development and will be entirely in rhyme, except where I mention SilverLight, which doesn’t seem to have much that rhymes with it.

You can find out more, and how to sponsor me, here:

/RedNoseDay

The Red Nose Game is also coming soon for Windows Phone….

Update on 2011-03-07 16:04 by Rob

Just got my first sponsor. Thanks James

Film Review Bonanza

Went to see “The Adjustment Bureau” today. Great film. A bit like Inception, but done better in my opinion. The story is based on one from Philip K. Dick. There have been so many films based on his writings that the next one will have to be a cinematic reworking of his laundry list. But I digress. The film tells of a pair of lovers star-crossed by fate or, more accurately, the Bureau of the title. Well acted, with very engaging leads. And a satisfying ending. It reminded me of a time I had to mend a desk in my office. Although actually that was “The Bureau Adjustment”. Anyhoo, enough of the bad jokes, good film, go see it.

Talking of “star crossed lovers”, here’s another pair. A week or so ago we went to see ”Gnomeo and Juliet” which tells of a couple of ceramic lovers of the garden gnome variety. This film has just enough wit and originality to sustain a 90 second trailer, which was unfortunately the thing I saw that made me decide to go and see it. Movies like this really make you appreciate Nick Park and Pixar, who can make producing this kind of fare seem effortless.  If you are five you might like it I suppose, but for the rest of you, just watch the trailer.

Billed as ‘the film that cost over 20,000,000,000,000 to make’ the movie ‘Inside Job’ is a documentary that tells the story of that economic crash thingy that was all over the papers a couple of years ago. You know, that thing that is going to blight the lives of an entire generation or two and is set to recur every now and then until the world realises that banks that are ‘Too Big To Fail’ are going to keep trying to.

I caught this film on the plane on the way home. You must see it too, if not for the lovely helicopter shots of cities then for the  squirming of some of the idiots daft enough to appear and try and justify the indefensible.

I’m sure it over-simplifies here and there and the viewpoint is not particularly balanced, but if only a fraction of what the film reveals is the case then the whole world (and I do mean everyone) has been taken for a massive ride. It has always puzzled me that things can just “go up in value” for no readily apparent reason. It turns out that they can’t, and if you base a business on this premise then every now and then we will have one of these massive crashes. If there ever was a job for the Adjustment Bureau then this is it.

Imagine Cup Live Meetings Next Week

I’m running two more Live Meetings next week, all about the Imagine Cup Software Design judging process.  The first one is on Monday, I should have recovered from my jet lag by then.

If you are entering, or thinking about it you really should come along. Here’s how:

The Live Meeting will be Monday, March 7, 2011 at 19:00 GMT and again on Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 6:00 GMT. The same content will be reviewed at both sessions, so choose the time that works best. To join:

1. Install Microsoft Office Live Meeting. We recommend that you do this several hours in advance.  
2. Join the meeting on March 7, 2011 at 19:00 GMT. Find out what time this is in your country/region.
3. Join the meeting on March 8, 2011 at 6:00 GMT. Find out what time this is in your country/region.

You can find more details, and recordings of the earlier meetings, here:

http://www.imaginecup.com/competitions/software

Flying Home from Seattle

Time to fly home today. It has been a very brief visit but well worth the trip.  Best MVP Summit ever. Thanks to all the folks at Microsoft for being so forthcoming about the future.

Windows Phone 7 Fun

Today we found out some more stuff about what’s coming for Windows Phone in the future. I reckon the only way to improve it would be to give away a free pie with each phone. Great stuff.

Steve Balmer Speaks

Say what you like about Steve Balmer, head honcho at Microsoft, but he can work an audience. We saw him in action today at the summit keynote. At the end of it I was left feeling that at the moment Microsoft doesn’t have all the answers, but it is certainly asking all the right questions.

In the evening we headed out to Jillian’s Billiards for some fun and games. The weather was dark and wet, something of a Seattle speciality it would seem. I got a bit carried away taking pictures of the traffic through the bus windows.

I think I was lucky to get this shot, which has the Space Needle in it – perhaps with a bit more post-processing I can actually make it visible….

We had a great time, I even managed to get a go at table tennis. And no, I didn’t fall off the table. On the way out to the taxi we were talking about business cards for some reason and I said that I thought it would be really cool to be able to whip out a playing card and say “The card you chose was the three of clubs” when someone gave me their business card. Well, I thought it was mildly amusing. Then Jeff produced this:

I think he had the other 51 cards with him as well.

Kudos to the Microsoft folks for a giving us such an interesting day and responding so constructively to the stuff that we said. Special shout out to Stephanie who is one of those organisers around whom the right things just seem to happen as though by magic.  Thanks for making everything work so well.

Return of the Midnight Coder

I’ve got this cunning plan for my trip to Seattle to avoid the dreaded jet-lag. The idea is to go to bed early each night and then get up around 2:00 am and spend a few hours awake doing stuff (which usually means writing some software). I then go back to bed around 4:30 and get a couple of hours more sleep before rising for the day. This should mean that I don’t actually adjust to local time, so when I go home I shouldn’t suffer too much.

Unfortunately this plan was somewhat sabotaged tonight when I ended up out and about until 10:30pm…. But it was a good night though.

This is what you see in the hotel lobby if you look straight up.

Seattle Shopping

We started the day with breakfast at Lowell's. If you ever go to Seattle you should just go there. Have anything, it is all great.

Good view of the bay too. I thought I’d take some pictures of signs.

I don’t think the sisters look that happy…

Best Flight Ever to Seattle

The lady in the red blazer came up to me as I was standing in line to check in for the flight. “Would you like me to find you a seat with more legroom?” she asked. Would I??? With a flourish of boarding passes I was moved to a seat that they had been keeping for tall people. Wonderful. The flight itself was very smooth and much shorter than expected, so I arrived feeling, if not as fresh as a daisy, certainly not as the crushed flower I thought I’d be. Hmm. Perhaps I’d better work harder on my similes in future.

Anyhoo, during the flight we had a good view of the coast of Greenland, and so I took some snaps. I’m here for the MVP summit which starts on Monday, in the meantime I’ve been meeting up with people I know and forgetting to remember their names. Great fun.

Friday Tutorial Fun

Friday at 5:15 pm is not really an auspicious time for a programming tutorial, but we do our best. Considering the horrible hour there was a pretty impressive turnout today,  and we did have fun. We were drawing text with XNA and playing with multiple draw operations to get fake 3D effects.

Great fun. Hull students, you can find the clock code in the lecture content for week 4.

Programming Puzzler

Quick test for all you programming experts. Will this stupid code compile?

public int InfiniteLoop()
{
    while (true)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Loopy");
        System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000);
    }
}

Note: All the namespaces are in place and the WriteLine and the Sleep are perfectly legal calls.

Update on 2011-02-24 18:00 by Rob

Turns out that it compiles just fine. The compiler is smart enough to work out that the method will never complete because it contains an infinite loop. This means that although the signature of InfiniteLoop defines it as returning an integer the compiler just says "Since the method never ends I'm not going to worry about it not returning a value when it says it should".

I'm not sure I agree with this behaviour. I saw it in the lab this morning and it surprised me. I would expect at least a warning, in case I'd put a loop in when I didn't mean to. 

The compiler doesn't fail to compile programs containing unreachable code either, although this does produce a warning.

More Open Day Fun

This is the lucky prize winner from the Open Day today. We had another great crowd.

These are some of them. Thanks for coming folks, hope you learnt something from the trip. I was asked if I had any ideas for things to do over summer to prepare for starting a Computer Science course. So I though I’d put some thoughts together.

First thing is to make sure you get good grades in your exams in summer. I’d hate to think that time spent playing with computers caused to you fail those.  But once you’ve done your exams I’d advise you to get hold of an introductory text on programming and have a go. You can get our First Year course here:

www.csharpcourse.com

There are links to my Windows Phone programming notes and also a version of my XNA book which you can download. If you are still a student I’d advise you to head off to Dreamspark and get hold of some free software. If you are not a student you can get free versions of Visual Studio here:

http://www.microsoft.com/express/

I wouldn’t try to do too much, but I would read the yellow book and try to get a feel for programming and what it is all about. A clue: it is not really mathematics, it is more about organisation.

Free Autodesk Software for Students

This one is worth knowing about. If you are a student who wants to create things like 3D models for XNA games you can now get Autodesk software, including AutoDesk 3D, for free from those lovely people at Autodesk. The over also extends to academic staff. Wonderful stuff. Find out more here:

http://students.autodesk.com/

XNA HiDef you Don’t Want

I was doing a lecture this afternoon to the first years and, frankly, it wasn’t going well. The microphone was not working, which meant I had to shout, and I’d not uploaded my slide deck correctly so I had to wait for my little laptop to download the presentation from Live Mesh.  Then I fired up my first empty XNA project to show the class how it worked and was rewarded with this.

Not good. Id used the machine to write Windows Phone games with no problem and I’d never seen that message before.  Fortunately we were near the end of the lecture and so I just showed that I could in fact get Windows Phone to work and then everyone had to leave.

Someone at the back had shouted “Use Reach” but at the time this hadn’t registered. Later, I took a look at the project settings:

 

Turns out that if you have fairly simple graphics hardware, like the one in my little laptop, it can’t handle the HiDef graphics and you have to select the Reach option for Game Profile.

I did this and everything worked, so I should be OK for tomorrow.