Now that we have the teams we need some things. I’ve spent a chunk of the day (not a very large one admittedly) working on things to give the teams. There were some great suggestions on the web site, I’ve added a few more of my own. My favourite so far “with a banjo”.
Be very afraid.
The Latest version of the Windows Phone Blue Book is taking shape. It seems to have grown to around 250 pages of Windows Phone 7.5 Mango powered goodness. It has all new content including coverage of databases, sockets, Fast Application Switching and lots of other good stuff. It will be released with a set of assets including slide decks and labs for those that want to use it for teaching. Microsoft Faculty Connection will be making it available soon. All I know is that I’ve finished writing all the words…
I told the First Year C# lecture about Three Thing Game this afternoon and loads of them signed up. Well done folks. We are pretty much full now, with 23 teams in the mix. I’d planned for 15, so we are going to have to spread out into extra labs around the place. I’ll be assigning spaces to teams and asking you if you are bringing your own kit.
I’ll be doing some sessions about XNA and Windows Phone Game development next week in the lead up to the 24 hour development on Saturday. Some things to bear in mind:
This is our biggest ever event. We will need even more Pizza. I hope it will all fit in the van..
What happens when a game of Katamari gets out of hand….
I’ve discovered a tip that makes the Nintendo 3DS portable game console much more fun to use. It makes the games look better and prevents that annoying headache that I used to get after around 10 minutes of gameplay.
I just have to turn the 3D slider all the way to the bottom.
Thanks dad.
We are running another Three Thing Game development at the end of October. These are open to any Hull University students who fancy having a go at some intense game development.
The "things" will be assigned to the teams on Monday 24th of October, with an overnight development session from 29th to 30th of October. We even get an extra hour thanks to the move from BST to GMT, which might prove crucial.
Registration is open now, you can find a registration form here.
We are searching out some bumper prizes for the winning team.
The 2011 version of the C# Yellow Book is now available for download at www.csharpcourse.com. This has been slightly updated, mainly to correct errors that people have been kind enough to report.
While you are there you can also download a copy of the Windows Phone Blue Book, but remember to come back in a couple of weeks, as I will have an updated version for you then.
Back to Hull today, and the weather seems to have reverted to UK normal as well.
We did our final day today at the Emirates stadium today. Another great audience, with some properly detailed questions. Of course I took some photos.
Underground Station
That must be our train…
Branded Water
Funky keyboard
Master Plan
Some of the audience looking suitably impressed.
There are more pictures on Flickr.
After a good day of content we headed out. Thanks to the Nokia folks for making us so welcome at each venue (and there have been some great venues). Also, huge thanks to Andy and Gregg, a pleasure to work with you guys, and a big shout out to Stephanie who basically kept all us ducks in a row…
Heading for the Emirates Stadium.
Today we started what will be our last Nokia Training event for Windows Phone. This one was rather special though, being based at the Emirates Stadium, home of The Arsenal football team. As well as doing our training, a chance of a trip around the ground was in the offing.
They even had Arsenal branded WiFi access (this one has expired now…)
The Hallowed turf
Some of the delegates, more on Flickr. I’ll stitch a panorama when I get home, not got the software on the tiny laptop.
Free Beer in a football stadium, what could possibly go wrong…
We had some lively discussions and I hope everyone got something out of the day. In terms of resources I said I’d put up links to the content. Here we are:
You can get all the content, slide decks and more, from the Jumpstart web site here:
http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/wpmango/m/mediagallery/default.aspx
The ones you want are:
01 Mango Building Phone Apps
02 Mango Intro Silverlight
03 Mango Advanced Silverlight
05 Mango FastApp Switching
11 Mango XNA Winphone
12 Mango Selling applications
There are also other decks and samples you might find interesting. If you want to watch videos of Andy and myself delivering this content (and who wouldn’t) then you can find them on Channel 9 here:
You can find the Tidy ToDo application here. To use the WCF server project you have to have IIS installed on your machine and you must start Visual Studio in Administrator mode:
https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=a4ce6a659fd80c02&resid=A4CE6A659FD80C02!1482
If you want to learn C# from the same text that we teach our students with at Hull, take a look here:
There is also a copy of the Windows Phone 7.0 Blue Book there, which has some background on phone programming that you might find useful.
Riding on the train down to London today I was delighted to find that I can now get Harry Harrrison books for Kindle. Including the “Stainless Steel Rat” and my personal favourite “The Technicolor Time Machine”. One of the great questions of the age is “Why have no Harry Harrison books been made into films yet?”. His stuff reads like movie scripts in many ways and is just so darned well written and amusing that it really should be on the big screen.
If you like fast moving Sci-Fi with a humorous twist then you should get a one of his books and have a read. I’d recommend “The Stainless Steel Rat” for starters. Great fun.
This was a great audience. I even had folks going “Woo Hoo” whenever I said robmiles.com….
We had our first University Open day on campus today. Great fun and an amazing turnout. By the time I started talking we had the whole lecture theatre full. Thanks so much for coming, I hope that the trip was worth it. Sorry about the jokes…
Anyhoo, if you did come – or if you didn’t – here are some useful links
www.csharpcourse.com will take you to the C# Yellow Book pages. You can download our complete First Year text from there as a PDF. Come to Hull on an admissions visit and we’ll give you a printed copy.
www.destructiongolf.com is the site for our first 24 hour programming competition. It includes a link to the 360 magazine article that was written about the event.
www.threethinggame.com is the site for our second competition. This includes videos from all the teams about their entries.
www.wherewouldyouthink.com is the site for admissions, I’ll be updating this soon with departmental news and other stuff.
I was taking a tutorial with the First Year this morning and I was talking about how difficult it is to make something that is easy to use. When you try to add a feature to make things “easier” for the user you often find that you have made your life as an engineer much more difficult. And then I thought of Steve Jobs, who passed away yesterday. He was legendary for giving his engineers hell. When they thought something was “good enough” he would refuse to accept it, repeatedly rejecting solutions that other companies would have shipped as “good enough”. He ended up with products that were truly delightful to use, and by starting with the person and making the technology fit, rather than vice-versa he moved things on into new places time and time again. And his engineers loved him for it, because he got them to make things that they never believed they could. We will not see his like again.
If you want to read about the way he drove Apple to make the Macintosh and get a feel for the way he worked in those early days, I can recommend West of Eden.
Did a 13 hour day today. And reminded myself why I love this job. Bunch of teaching on our new hardware modules, then a first year lecture, then a slew of project meetings, then the Postgraduate Party. This was another quiz and video game frenzy which kept me at work until 9:30 pm, but was great fun. Thanks to the Systems team for setting up both parties with speed and efficiency and to Simon for the scary picture quiz that has now got to be an annual feature.
The winning team with their big box of sweets
These guys came second. 
These guys got to take away the coveted “White Chocolate Bar of Power”.
Another big day tomorrow.
Not a bad way to start the day. Cooked to perfection as well.
Final day of training in Berlin today.
This time we were in the slightly more intimate surroundings of the cafe next to the college we were at yesterday. Really nice setup, with fantastic food. The food has been really good everywhere I’ve been on this tour.
They had even branded the conference table upstairs, which was rather sweet.
The German audience stayed tough on us. One of the things that I reckon is that if a course goes well the audience learns a lot. If a course goes really well, the teacher learns a lot too. And that is how it has turned out. Some of the technical questions that we got really had us digging deep to find answers and even writing test programs to show what was going on. And I now have ideas for a whole bunch of blog posts about Windows Phone development that I must write down before I forget.
Then it was straight to the airport to fly home. Busy day tomorrow. Is there any other kind?
Today we did the first day of our Windows Phone training in Berlin. Of course I took pictures.
Not a bad view when you are having breakfast
What we are here for
Badges
They even had branding on the floor…
Jens Dissmann of Nokia Germany gets things started
A great audience, with some really tough questions.
I said I’d put up links to the content. Here we are:
You can get all the content, slide decks and more, from the Jumpstart web site here:
http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/wpmango/m/mediagallery/default.aspx
The ones you want are:
01 Mango Building Phone Apps
02 Mango Intro Silverlight
03 Mango Advanced Silverlight
05 Mango FastApp Switching
11 Mango XNA Winphone
12 Mango Selling applications
There are also other decks and samples you might find interesting. If you want to watch videos of Andy and myself delivering this content (and who wouldn’t) then you can find them on Channel 9 here:
You can find the Tidy ToDo application here. To use the WCF server project you have to have IIS installed on your machine and you must start Visual Studio in Administrator mode:
https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=a4ce6a659fd80c02&resid=A4CE6A659FD80C02!1482
Oh, and we got some questions about Codec support in Windows Phone. You can find the list of supported codecs for media playback here:
Why can you never find a mouse when you need one…
Flew out to Berlin today. The Nokia Windows Phone Training is moving on to yet another country. I wasn’t able to make the Madrid one on Friday, but I’m told it went well and that a good time was had by all. And here I am in Berlin. Lovely city. I’m wandering round remembering why I like it so much.
The hotel suite I’m in is the biggest one I’ve ever stayed in. It has a bigger living room than our house. I did actually get lost in it at one point. I’m only here for a couple of nights, back in Hull on Thursday, but I really could live in this place. Me and around ten of my friends…
Spent a little chunk of today upgrading my Windows Phone to the proper version of Mango. Some time ago I was lucky enough to get hold of the Release Candidate for Windows Phone 7.5 and last week they released the final version. When we did the Release Candidate upgrade we were told to make a backup of the phone and keep this safe, safe, safe so that we could revert back to the version from the mobile operator (in my case Orange) and then apply their upgrades too.
Of course I lost mine.
I can’t really think of a good excuse either. I just went back to where it should have been and it wasn’t there. I think I confused CTRL+Drag (copy) with Drag (move) and then ended up with one less copy of the file than I thought.
Never mind, the good news is that the Windows Phone folks have supplied an update that removes the need to return to any backups. This is also nice because it means that any SMS messages, phone calls and other stuff in the really useful messaging threads will stay up to date. The update runs twice, once to put the latest version of Windows 7.5 on your device and again to reconnect the phone to the update servers from your mobile operator. It works well, in fact the first thing that happened after I’d done all this was another update from Samsung.
If you have upgraded your phone to Windows Mango Release Candidate you should be getting the messages about upgrades real soon now. I’ve not noticed much new about the new version yet, but then the Release Candidate was pretty darned solid anyway.
Make sure that when you do the backup you do it on a machine which the phone is synchronised with. That way it will take (another) backup that might be useful in the future. I’m going to try very hard not to lose this one.
Oh, and the final version of the Windows Phone SDK is now out. Head over to create.msdn.com to get your copy. Great stuff.
Went up town today and bought some bathroom fittings. You wouldn’t believe how many different kinds of toilet roll holder there are.
The lab before we started. Apparently we’ve replaced over half the machines over summer…
Today was the first programming lab. Great fun. All the students turned up and were given a memory key (for files) and a copy of the Yellow Book for 2011-2012 (How quickly the years go by). If you want an electronic copy you can head over to www.csharpcourse.com for a PDF.
Trust me, in real life it is actually very yellow indeed.
My favourite moment in the lab was when a student asked me a question and I didn’t know the answer. “Can’t you tell me roughly"?” he enquired “I don’t know.” I said in my best gravelly voice.
Welcome to Hull.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
