Windows Phone XNA in TechDays Antwerp

This is the Metropolis in Antwerp. Nice venue.

This is my usual picture of the audience arriving.

Did my first Windows Phone session of this part of my “World Tour” ™. I’m at Tech-Days in the Netherlands tomorrow and Friday. Thanks for being a great audience folks, although with the bright lights it was a bit hard to see if there was anyone out there (although I did hear some clapping from time to time). You can find all the code I talked about, and a lot more, in my demo directory:

/demos

Heading to Antwerp

Some of these trains do not exist.

In the Netherlands trains don’t run late. They just don’t run. Which makes for all kinds of fun and games if you try to use the ones that aren’t there. The 14:07 from Schipol airport to Antwerp made a brief guest appearance on the station display before vanishing. After a while I got to recognise the “apologetic cough” in Dutch that pre-ceded messages about trains that weren’t going to run. Even though I couldn’t understand much of the rest of the announcements.

Fortunately they announce the international trains in English too (I still find the idea of trains that “go abroad” really exciting) and so I was able to figure out how to get to Rotterdam and then change for Antwerp. And here I am. The hotel is great, the presentations are written and the demos are working. I’ve even found a McDonalds to have tea in. Looking forward to tomorrow.

Antwerp Central Station looking good.

Ready for Tech Days

I’m doing some bits and bobs at TechDays around Europe this week, starting with a Windows Phone gaming session in Antwerp on Wednesday 27th, then a keynote session, a Micro Framework session and a Geek Night Windows Phone session in rhyme on Thursday at The Hague in the Netherlands. On Friday, assuming I survive, I’m doing another Windows Phone gaming session. At the moment I’m busy preparing all the content and demos. I’m making something completely new for the keynote, and I’m rather pleased to find that it is mostly working, which is nice. 

You can find out about TechDays in the Netherlands here:

http://www.techdays.nl/

You can find out about TechDays in Antwerp here:

http://www.microsoft.com/belux/techdays/2011/

I head out tomorrow, I’m trying to squeeze a robot, microcontroller, laptop and all my other bits and bobs into a single carry on bag.  

The Rob Miles Roadshow

Next week I’m doing a Mix session all about game development in XNA, stay tuned for some brand new examples and sample code, but unfortunately no new jokes. I’ve just found out that I’m also doing Ask the Experts on Tuesday evening starting at 6:00 pm  (and for once I’m not going to be doing the asking).  They are using a “speed dating” arrangement where we meet up with a bunch of folks for 20 minute slots where we get over the gist of what we are at Mix for. I’ll be doing Windows Phone games (of course) and I’d love to meet you if you come along. Strange this, nothing for years and then two sessions of speed dating in a matter of a weeks.

If you are lucky enough to have a Windows Phone you can download the official Mix application which is great. And also mentions me. Search the marketplace for “Mix 11”.

The “Rob Miles Roadshow”™ then rumbles on to TechDays later this month. They also have a really good Windows Phone application too, although this one works best if you can speak Dutch. Search the marketplace for “Techdays”.

I’m doing a session on Windows Phone games, another on the .NET Micro Framework and a third (deep breath) where I’m going to be talking about Windows Phone development in rhyme, just for Geek Night. And I’m also making an appearance at one of the keynotes too. Now, if that’s not a reason to buy a new pair of jeans, I don’t know what is… Find out more here.

Prizes and Rewards with Windows Phone

There has never been a better time to be a Windows Phone developer. If you are a UK student you can take part in a Student Competition where you can win prizes just by submitting applications to the Marketplace. Since you can also sell these applications, and it costs you nothing to join the Marketplace if you register via DreamSpark this seems like a pretty good deal. Find out more here.

If you are old like me and therefore no longer a student you can instead sign up for the Think.Dev rewards programme and get prizes and rewards for submitting apps. This is open to all Windows Phone developers in the UK and you get stuff for just turning up and submitting apps. I might even win a prize for Cheese Lander (although this is probably unlikely). Sign up here.

Rob at Mix 11 in Las Vegas

For those of you lucky enough to be going to Mix this year, I’ll be joining you as well.  I’m giving a session on Tuesday 12th of April at 11:30 am in Breakers D. The subject is “XNA Game Studio for Fun, Profit, Danger, Excitement and Windows Phone 7 Games”. There will be all new content, but all old jokes.

I’m also doing a booth session in the Windows Phone Booth (good name that) at 2:00 pm on the same day. Feel free to drop by and say hi. I’ll even sign copies of my book that you’ve bought….

30 Minutes in Paris

I went to Paris today. For half an hour. That’s the time it takes a person to sprint from terminal 2C to terminal 2F, jump the security queue and collapse exhausted on seat 10A of the flight out. The lady at the Air Bulgaria desk in Sofia expressed surprise that I was flying from Sofia to Amsterdam today, what with there being no flights in that direction. Fortunately the airline computers were equal to this, and had me going to Paris first, and then to Amsterdam, and then a six hour wait and then a flight back to Hull.

Lovely.

Fortunately I managed to sprint across the airport and made it  just in time. The rest of the journey passed without incident, although Schipol airport is not actually the most inspiring place to spend the best part of a working day.

The whole trip was worth it though. I’ve met some splendid folks and had a great time. I know it is very dangerous to extrapolate a whole race and culture just from the few people from there you happen to meet (I dread to think what would happen if folks started thinking all English people were like me) but I really liked the Bulgarians I met up with (and I saw quite  a few when we were “Speed dating” on Tuesday). They don’t suffer fools gladly. If you ask a confirming question (which I am wont to do), for example “So that means the Airport Shuttle will be leaving at 5:00 am?” they will look at you as if you are an idiot, bearing in mind they have just told you this. Actually, thinking about it, it was a rather idiotic question though…

Bulgarians also seem to have an earnest seriousness when you first meet them, but this quickly turns to riotous humour – which is great.

We went out for a meal last night. Great food and the beer was really nice but we had to have several glasses just to make sure..

Sofia airport coffee at 5:45 am..

Windows Phone at MS Days

Did my second session of the day on Windows Phone. This is some of the audience before the start. Thanks for being another great audience folks.  Everything worked, in some cases eventually. My “party piece du-jour” was to start the program on the device rather than the emulator. I did it pretty much every time, in the end the people watching were spotting it before I did.

I got a question about Windows Phone Marketplace during the talk and I said I’d follow up on these pages. As I understand it this is as much a legal as a technical issue, in terms of how the law works in Bulgaria. At the moment you have to go through another publisher I’m afraid, which means people like http://appamundi.com/Publishing/ or http://www.yallaapps.com/.

You can find all the content from the lecture, including slides and demos, here.

After I’d finished I had a wander round and took some pictures of the conference.

Who knows what goes on behind these doors….

Nice Banner

Windows Phone, Bulgarian style

The conference is being held in a huge cinema multiplex. If you hurry you might make one of the 10:00 showings..

Nice Lights

Fun at Microsoft Days

Got my conference badge this morning, along with a very fancy pin which marks me out as a speaker at the conference. I got in and got set up and then went and watched one of the keynote sessions. The first part was in Bulgarian, which was pretty much lost on me I’m afraid, but the main talk was by Mingfei Yan, who talked about the cloud and how it is going to change everything. I reckon all of our students should see this, lots of food for thought about the way that computing is going.

At one point she showed some augmented reality, where a 3D car model was streamed down onto a marker on a piece of paper. Great fun.

Then it was time for my Micro Framework session.

Everything worked and I had a great audience. This is some of them as the room filled up. Some great questions and a round of applause at the end. Although it was probably for the robot.

I’ve put all the resources for the talk here.

On now to experts lounge and then the Windows Phone talk.

Hello Bulgaria

Flew out to Sofia today to give some sessions at Microsoft Days 2011. The journey out was complicated slightly by a two hour delay on the  flight from Amsterdam to Sofia. They didn’t actually announce “The flight is being held up while we put the seat in front of Rob into the ‘permanently reclined’ position” but I think that is probably what happened.

Anyhoo, I made it in the nick of time for our trip to a local university Damien Caro and myself met up with a bunch of students and, once we managed to make our laptops talk to the projector, we had a great time. I gave a demonstration of my silly robot and a Windows Phone game involving cheese. Damien talked about the Cloud which is going to change our lives.

I took a picture just as everyone was leaving. Thanks for being a great audience folks.

Starting the speed dating

Then. straight after our lecture, it was time to head off to a trendy city centre bar for some ‘speed dating’ with journalists. This was one of the most intense things I’ve ever done. We had five minutes with each person and we were shouting introductions, questions and answers over each other. Great fun, although I ended up a little hoarse by the end.

One journalist had this amazing handbag.

After that it was time to head back to the hotel and make sure that my little robot knows his lines for tomorrow.

Kinect and Home Sweet Home

Tom and Laurie from Home Sweet Home came into the department so that we could work on our setup for Platform Expo, which is coming up real fast. We had Paul Murphy from BBC Look North along to take some film as well, which was nice. We showed what we had done and most of it worked. To see all of it working you could come along to the Platform Expo a week on Sunday (the 27th) and even drive the music and video yourself.

http://platformexpos.com/

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.

Microsoft Career Conference 17th Feb

I’m treading the virtual boards again. There’s a Microsoft Certified Career Conference on Thursday and I’m doing a session about Windows Phone development. You can find out more, and sign up, here:

http://www.mscareerconference.com/

The title of the session is “60 Minutes Rock Star: Find out how to become a Windows Phone Rock Star”. It as at 2:30 pm GMT. I might even get my guitar of the wall and lay down some riffs.

Then again, I might not….

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.

DDD Manchester

A great audience. Even though not all of them like cheese.

Today I got on the train to Manchester, did 90 minutes of standup with a broken voice and then got on a train back to Hull. I had to wear two microphones, that’s how bad my voice was.

Anyhoo, the sessions I did (Writing Windows Phone Games and Windows Phone Marketplace) seemed to go OK. Thanks to the guys at Appamundi for inviting me to speak.

I said I’d put the slides and sample code up on the net and, as a man of my croaky word, you can find it all here.

On the way out of Manchester I, of course, took some photos.

Print Works and Odeon looking good

“The Wheel of Manchester” – it doesn’t half go round fast…

Hull Digital TechMesh Meetup

Today’s Hull Digital MeetUp was interesting. We had a presentation from TechMesh, who provide networking (of the human kind) between like-minded IT and Telecoms business in the area, a talk from Nick Riley from Hull University Logistics Institute about the use of RFID and a few words from MediaSat3. And very nice free food and drink.

Hull Digital are organising a very interesting event next month. Hull Digital Question Time brings together a bunch of experts, including the Vice Chancellor of the university, and invites the audience to ask questions. Should be fun.

TechDays 2010 Portugal Session Resources

ACA009 Creating Windows Phone Games

Here is the content from my session. Thanks for being a great audience.

• Slide Deck
• Demo1: DamageCalc Silverlight Application
• Demo2: PatternMatch Silverlight Game
• Demo3a: StarLight XNA Game using XNA Accelerometer Emulation 
• Demo03b: Windows XNA “Game” Serving Gamepad accelerometer
• Demo04: WP7 Phone XNA Multi-touch Piano
• Demo05: WP7 XNA 3D Triangle Drawing
• Demo06: WP7 XNA Particle System

The code works on the current version of the CTP for the Windows Phone system. You can download this from here. If you want to use demo 3B to serve out accelerometer information to your phone app make sure that the program is running with Administrator privileges, and that you have modified the URL in the Phone Starlight program to address this host (localhost should just work).

If you want to get started with Windows Phone you can find a list of useful lines (and some FAQ entries) here.

ACA004 Giving Robots Life with the .NET Micro Framework

I left Oscar the robot powered up overnight by mistake. I was very impressed to find that he still had plenty of battery power left this morning. Fortunately nobody had been sending movement commands to him via the secret URL otherwise he could have gone anywhere!

• Slide Deck
• Demo 01: A Robot Coward
• Demo 02: A Robot Coward with a Kill Switch and Lights
• Demo 03a: Micro Framework Web Host
• Demo 03b: Fez Micro Robot controller
• Demo 03C: WP7 Windows Phone Silverlight App to control a robot

If you want to get hold of a robot and Fez controllers you can go to:

http://www.tinyclr.com/

If you want to get hold of the Web Server board you can go here:

http://devicesolutions.net/Products/Tahoe.aspx

If you want the most powerful Micro Framework board I’ve ever seen you can go here:

http://www.ghielectronics.com/product/125

The Micro framework at Microsoft can be found here. There are links to platform manufacturers and a very useful forum. You can even propose enhancements to the platform.

http://www.microsoft.com/netmf/default.mspx

Windows Phone 7 Presentation Now on Channel 9

 
Matthijs Hoekstra from Microsoft Netherlands has put my DevDays Netherlands session from a couple of weeks back up on Channel 9. You can find it here.

Note to self. A black T shirt under a white polo shirt might be a fashion statement, but it isn’t a statement that you really want to make.

Fun with Visual Studio 2010 Tech Days in London

Which door would you choose?

Went down to London today to give a session as part of tech-days Visual Studio Developer Days. It was great fun, even though just about everything broke at some point during the talk. Richard from Black Marble was on before me and did a very impressive talk about the new testing features in Team Foundation Server.

Doesn’t Richard look like Bill Gates?

When my turn came my laptop had gone to sleep and forgotten to produce any video output. Then I had all kinds of finger trouble typing in programs and my microphone broke and fell off twice. But it was all good…

A blurry version of me, which is how I felt at the time…

Some of the audience, all of whom were absolutely great.

The whole thing took place in a cinema, so I had the biggest screen I’ve ever used in my life.  You can find the presentation here and the demo code here.

As part of the day I was interviewed for Underbelly, a new Microsoft website for developers. you can find my interview here. If you really want to…