Adam Nathan's Old Blog

My New Blog

Adam Nathan — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 17:16:15 GMT

You're now officially looking at my old blog. My new blog is at http://blog.adamnathan.net, or more simply, http://adamnathan.net. Along with this switch is a switch in focus. My new blog will mostly discuss Windows Phone 7 app development. Enjoy!

Announcing "101 Windows Phone 7 Apps"

Adam Nathan — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 17:14:08 GMT

As I tweeted the other day, my new Windows Phone 7 book is now available for pre-order. Here's the first draft of the cover (with many app icons still needed to be filled in):

The title could be a little confusing (and we might still tweak it), so let me be clear that this is a book for software developers! Each chapter walks you through the creation of a full app, teaching you lessons about Silverlight and Windows Phone along the way. The first 10 chapters alone could be an entire book on Silverlight, with coverage of controls, layout, events, data binding, resources, styles, custom controls, and much more! I put great emphasis in creating apps that look and feel like the apps that ship with the phone, so you'll learn how to use the application bar, pivot/panorama controls, animations, etc. the way that they were intended to be used. And having created so many complete Windows Phone apps, I've got tons of tips and pitfalls to share.

The 101 apps are real apps. Apps that are (or will be) in the marketplace. Apps that people are willing to pay for. 101 apps == 101 chapters, spread across two volumes. Volume I covers 50 apps, and Volume II will cover 51 apps. Volume I is organized as follows:

Part I: Getting Started
Part II: Transforms & Animations
Part III: Storing & Retrieving Local Data
Part IV: Pivot & Panorama
Part V: Audio & Video
Part VI: Microphone
Part VII: Touch & Multi-Touch
Part VIII: Accelerometer

Each volume includes a disc with full source & artwork for the apps covered in that volume. Even if you don't read the book, you could take the source code to, say, Tip Calculator, and add some features to it. You only need to make yours slightly better than mine, and you might have the best tip calculator in the marketplace! Or, perhaps you could repurpose the source code and create a loan calculator. No matter what your app idea, "there's a chapter for that!"

To get more updates on this book, switch over to my new blog at http://adamnathan.net. Thanks!

WPF 4 Unleashed!

Adam Nathan — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 23:26:37 GMT

I've been seriously neglecting my blog, but I just wanted to point out that WPF 4 Unleashed is now available!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0672331195?ie=UTF8&tag=adamnathannet-20

Maybe someday soon I'll explain the differences between the two books it in more depth. :)

Silverlight 2 Unleashed Available for Pre-Order

Adam Nathan — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 10:00:02 GMT

I told someone awhile back, "Don’t worry, there will be a Silverlight 2 Unleashed. The only real question is whether I'll be the one writing it."

Until a few weeks ago, I just couldn’t make up my mind. (I know, it was a bit late to decide!) But finally I did, concluding that life has been too hectic to write another book. Fortunately, Laurent Bugnion had already been writing a "Teach Yourself" book on Silverlight 2 over the past year, so it was natural to convert it into Silverlight 2 Unleashed.

I met with Laurent last year when he was getting started with the book, and I’m sure it’s going to turn out great! So check it out!

Popfly Games: Now With High Score Tracking!

Adam Nathan — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 23:03:28 GMT

Yesterday afternoon we updated Popfly with arguably the most fun feature yet for both viewers and game authors. Popfly games automatically track scores, wins, and losses for the people who play the games. If you browse to http://www.popfly.com/Profile/Achievements.aspx, you can see your stats and find out about popular games you haven’t played yet:

On each game’s page, you’ll find a little scoreboard so you can compare your performance against your Popfly friends or game author:

And these features (+ more) apply to Facebook as well, now that you can turn any Popfly game into your very own Facebook game. Any game you create automatically gets a scoreboard that compares Facebook friends, a nifty profile presence, news feed notifications, etc. For example, you can check out the Facebook version of my Crayon Cannon game.

So, as a game creator, what should you do to take maximum advantage of this:

Use the game-level Score property (if you want to keep any kind of score). Any numeric values will do, and if you want lower scores to be better, simply click the lower score is better button on the Game tab of the creator.
Use Won and Lost scenes. You can have as many of these type of scenes as you want. And you can now add more at any time via the Add a Scene dialog.
If you don’t care about scores or win/loss records, you still might as well make your game end on a Won scene. That way your game at least gets credit for having been played every time that scene is reached.

New Game Creator features are now live!

Adam Nathan — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 07:21:00 GMT

A few hours ago we released our 20th major update to Popfly, which includes our first update to the game creator since it was released just over a month ago. There are tons of new features for you game creators out there, so I want to highlight them for you:

1. The new "color swapper" enables easy customization of any actor’s colors

This comes in very handy for differentiating good guys vs. bad guys, or just giving your game a unique look without needing artistic skill.

2. You can now rename actors

This was long overdue!

3. You can now publish your own actors so others can use them in their games

Some of you have already created fantastic custom actors. I’m looking forward to seeing them show up in search results!

4. Guide lines & snapping in the UI designer make it easier to arrange your visuals just right

You can toggle this setting with the "Snapping" button above the scene or actor appearance designer.

5. Actor stamping makes adding multiple actors fast & easy

This might take a little getting used to, but it makes it much faster to add actors exactly where you want them to be. As soon as you add one, you can instantly move/resize/delete it before stamping more actors. And if you resize the actor, the stamp will adjust to these new dimensions. Click the arrow on the left to change to normal selection mode.

6. 4 new events make it easy to create more powerful games (Scene Enter, Viewport Enter, Viewport Leave, and State Change)

For example, you could make a bad guy in a side-scroller move toward the hero only when the bad guy is within the current viewport.

7. You can now filter any Scene Enter/Leave or Viewport Enter/Leave event by one or more directions

Useful for many games, such as this one.

8. Creating multi-level games is easier, because you can now clone an existing scene

This saves tons of time. I used this to create a multi-level Kill The Peas.

9. Searching & browsing of actors has been enhanced

10. The behaviors list is now a bit more helpful, since it shows exactly what key has been chosen for a keyboard event

11. You can now turn a Popfly game or mashup into your own first-class Facebook application

You can do this by clicking "Create Your Own Facebook Application" option from the Facebook button on Popfly’s share widget.

Through Popfly, you create & control the core app and can upload an image to be shown in the app's profile box.
Through Facebook, you can control all kinds of things – icon, logo, what should be on the about page, etc. You get all the features of Facebook dedicated to your own app – a discussion board, analytics, reviews, wall, fans, etc.

Embedding a game (even as a plain ol' IFRAME) can be a pretty powerful thing. Check out what "What Now" (a kids' TV show in New Zealand) did with their Popfly game!

12. You can now see how many views your game or mashup has received

13. We've made some cosmetic updates to help authors highlight their creations and get feedback

14. We’ve added more actors

15. We’ve also fixed lots of bugs, including ones reported in our forum. A notable one: saving large games should be much faster (and avoid pesky unresponsive script dialogs).

Popfly Game Creator Sample: Type Type Revolution

Adam Nathan — Sat, 03 May 2008 17:10:00 GMT

I'm here at Maker Faire, getting ready to demo the Popfly Game Creator, and here's a new game I just created:

You can click "tweak" to see how I created it, make changes, and save it as your own. But here's a quick summary of what I did:

I made the A, S, D, and F buttons by taking existing actors & changing their appearance. (Removing the icon and adding a TextBlock.)
I added an "Active" property to the A button initialized to 0.
I gave the A button a constant downward motion, and set its Active property to 1 when the button collides with the horizontal bar, then reset it to 0 when it uncollides.
I made the A button disappear when the A key is pressed AND Active=1 (using a filter on the event).
I incremented the built-in game-level Score property by 15 when the A key is pressed AND Active=1.
Handy shortcut: I copied the behaviors & properties on A to the S, D, and F buttons by using the "I want this actor to... act like Plus Button" shortcut. (Plus Button is the name of the A button. Yes, we don't support naming/renaming actors yet. We'll be sure to add that soon!) I then updated the references to the A key to the appropriate key.
On the main scene, I added a behavior to deduct 5 points whenever A, S, D, or F are pressed. (That way, the player gets 5 points deducted for an incorrect key press and 15-5=10 points added for a correct key press.)
I added behaviors on the main scene to spawn the A, S, D, F buttons at the top of the scene, each triggered by a timer that fires randomly between 1 and 3 seconds.
I added a scene change behavior to transition to the Won scene after 60 seconds.
I used a timer actor that already knows how to display elapsed time, but made it count down instead by initializing its ElapsedTime property to 60 (seconds) instead of 0 and changing the code in one of its behaviors to use a - instead of a +.

Enjoy!

Popfly Game Creator! (What I've been doing the last 6 months)

Adam Nathan — Fri, 02 May 2008 21:06:00 GMT

At the end of last year, my team was nice enough to let me start working on a Silverlight-based casual game creator for Popfly, one that makes it easy to create a variety of games with no coding experience required. And here it is! For the past 2-3 months we've had two additional developers, a program manager, and a test developer focused on this, so today is a huge milestone for us. Everyone on the Popfly team has been a huge help making this happen. And since several of us only slept from about 3:30-7:30 last night, I'm not going to write very much right now. :) But here are some notes:

The whole thing works with Silverlight 1.0, as well as Silverlight 2 (currently in beta).
You can easily change any game (whether it's a visual thing or a logic thing) by clicking the "tweak" button at the bottom of all games and logging into Popfly.
We've got the best library of XAML-based artwork I know of (and this will continue to grow, especially as we open it up). Right now the artwork comes from a variety of places, but huge thanks go to Dan at lostgarden.com, the Expression team, and my wife.
We've got some great sound effects and music. Bonus points to anyone who can figure out where the music (classic songs such as "7 AM Illusion" and "Punkarama") came from.
I'm sure you'll have a mile-long list of feature requests. So do we! This is step 1... expect us to keep updating this regularly.

Here are two videos I've recorded to explain more:

One example of creating a game from scratch

A montage of some of our sample games (created with little or no code)

Enjoy!

.NET Rocks!

Adam Nathan — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:25:00 GMT

I was fighting off a cold and perhaps not always thinking straight, but here I am on episode #314 of .NET Rocks!

Petzold strikes again!

Adam Nathan — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 20:11:00 GMT

(Or, rather, struck again last summer.) I just found Jeff's post about receiving a book from Petzold complete with witty comments. I was also a lucky recipient of an autographed book, so I thought I'd share what Petzold had to say to me:

Funny stuff! (He's referring to this discussion, in case you missed it.) I haven't had a chance to read the book, but it looks really good. To say "thank you," I've been meaning to send him a signed copy of Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed, but I haven't been able to come up with something witty enough to say. "No third dimension, alas, but plenty of color?"

Today's ego boosts

Adam Nathan — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 17:46:00 GMT

PC World has just named Popfly one of the "25 Most Innovative Products of the Year"

WPF Unleashed has just been nominated for a 2007 Jolt Product Excellence Award, which recognizes "the most innovative, trend-making, ahead-of-the-curve products"

Obviously I'm really pleased and grateful about both of these developments, as both of these products have been a labor of love. It feels like so little time has passed since Popfly was a team of two, and now we've got a nice-sized talented team (small by Microsoft's standards, of course) running full steam ahead. And again I need to give credit to Neil Rowe at SAMS for the way we used color in WPF Unleashed, which no doubt is the most "innovative and trend-making" aspect of the book. I work with some great people (and for a great company), which enables recognition like this to happen.

My wife is concerned that my head is no longer going to fit through the door. :) It's too bad that when I do something differently than the way she expects it, she uses a different word than "innovative."

Popfly public beta!

Adam Nathan — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 21:05:00 GMT

As Steve Ballmer announced this morning, Popfly (my day job) is now open to the public! All you need is a Windows Live ID. This morning I decided to use Popfly to show a noticeable trend in my books:

Tip: Click MashOut -> Tweak this from the little overlay to experiment with customizing this little app with your own data.

Of course, this trend in page count is also easy to see in person:

To keep the trend going, I guess my next project is going to be a pamphlet on Popfly! :) Actually, I promised my wife that my writing days are over, so the next value in the sequence is 0. I'm happy to let someone else do the writing for a change. In fact, I see that a book is actually already planned for Popfly! Awesome!

By the way, I've gotten some emails from people who pre-ordered Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed asking why Amazon is giving weird information about the ship date. Don't worry... they should be starting to ship already! As you can see from the above photo, I've already gotten a copy!

View and Edit Live Silverlight Examples

Adam Nathan — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 17:10:00 GMT

Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed is days away from shipping. To celebrate, you can (1) pre-order your copy now and (2) check out examples from the book at http://www.adamnathan.net/silverlight/code.

You can not only view the HTML/XAML/JavaScript source and the resulting output, but you can edit all of it on-the-fly. Here's a screencast that demonstrates.

Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed is now available (sort of)

Adam Nathan — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 21:27:00 GMT

I'm going through the very last revisions, but in parallel the book has now appeared on Safari as a "Rough Cut." What is a Rough Cut? The almost-final chapters in "raw" unformatted HTML. The pictures in the book should still show up, although they might appear in black & white unlike the full-color printed book. On Safari, you can purchase immediate online access, or even a bundle that includes the printed book (when it is completely finished, of course). I don't have online access myself, but I believe the chapters should start trickling in on Monday or Tuesday.

By the way, here is the final table of contents:

Part I          Fundamentals
1      Getting Started
2      XAML
Part II        Creating Static Content
3      Shapes, Lines, and Curves
4      Text
5      Brushes and Images
6      Positioning and Transforming Elements
Part III      Making Your Content Come to Life
7      Responding to Input Events
8      Downloading Content on Demand
9      Animation
10    Audio & Video

Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed!

Adam Nathan — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 17:15:00 GMT

It's now official and on Amazon! As indicated by the (temporary) cover, it will be in full color, just like WPF Unleashed! As always, take the release date with a grain of salt because I haven't even written the whole book yet, but rest assured that it won't be out until after Silverlight 1.0 is finished. Although considering that I was able to write .NET and COM 100 years before the technology was introduced, I don't really need to wait...

WPF Unleashed, with Yaks!

Adam Nathan — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:53:00 GMT

I got the following email this morning that astounded me. I thought I'd share (with the author's permission):

Just dropping a line telling you I like your WPF Unleashed book a lot, and brought it to my recent trip to Tibet. I also took a picture of your book in the wild, and thought you might like the photo!

Cheers,
Luc (Paris, France)

Looking through the photo album, I uncovered this photo as well. I guess the book can be used for many things!

A guessing game created with Popfly

Adam Nathan — Sat, 19 May 2007 06:47:00 GMT

The credit for this idea goes to Tim Rice, a superstar developer I have the pleasure of working with every day. The game is simple: Try to guess which of the listed locations is pictured by selecting the choice in the dropdown.

This was created by grabbing recent posts from Twitter, extracting the locations, plopping them in a dropdown, then randomly choosing one to use as a search term for Flickr. The whole thing - even the logic to determine whether you're right or wrong - could almost be written without code if it weren't for some bugs. (Grrr... it's my fault, though.) Still, writing code against such simple APIs exposed by the blocks (Twitter, Flickr, User Input, Filter, Calculator, and more) is a pleasure. Trying to do things without code is a fun challenge for me, though! It helps me to validate the power of the designer.

Yes, I'm on the Microsoft Popfly Team!

Adam Nathan — Fri, 18 May 2007 19:03:00 GMT

It's been an exciting year! As John sums up, I joined him almost a year ago (when he was a team of one) and had a blast creating and constantly evolving a prototype of what is now Microsoft Popfly. During 2006, we demoed it again and again to one executive after another. Last fall, I got to demo it to Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie, then later even Steve Ballmer. It was all pretty surreal.

We've grown into a decent-sized team and have been in hard-core execution mode all year. And as of this morning, we are public! We're still an invitation-only alpha, and we still have quite a bit of work ahead of us, but it's a major milestone nonetheless! (Note that our team is also responsible for Visual Studio Express, but I don't have anything to do with that.)

To get a good sense of what Popfly is all about, check out the video recorded by Dan & Suzanne from our team. It's all about having fun creating and sharing software. But you can create some very useful things quite easily, too. Here's a live example that is clearly in the fun category rather than useful:

This displays the beginning of the most recent comment on my blog's most recent post in ransom-note style (thanks to Flickr). I created this by mashing a few blocks together, and only had to type three characters of code (and that was only to work around a bug... remember, we are an alpha!). Add a comment to this post, and watch it update! (You might have to wait awhile for your comment to appear and the RSS feed to update.)

Petzold vs. Nathan? Books Like PowerPoint Presentations? Books Like Blogs?

Adam Nathan — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 12:38:00 GMT

Last week a coworker brought this article by Jeff Atwood to my attention:

Coding Horror: How Not To Write a Technical Book

Of course, I'm flattered by what Jeff (and commenters) said, and I'm happy that he gave my book a chance (especially since he didn't seem to be familiar with my .NET and COM book). I'm also honored to be mentioned in the same breath as Petzold, who is clearly a really smart guy and a legend. What surprised me was the amount of interest the story generated. Even Tim O'Reilly chimed in and posted sales comparisons between our two books. (Although in addition to the funky math, it seems unfair to Petzold to omit the 3-4 months when his book was out and mine wasn't.)

I didn't think Petzold's first reaction was an insult to my writing. Besides, I tried converting my book into a PowerPoint presentation and it didn't quite work out:

Anyway, the biggest surprise came when Petzold posted a clarification of his reaction in which he called my book "remarkable and enlightening." Wow. That's a comment I won't soon forget! What do you think the chances are that we could put that quote on the cover for the next printing of WPF Unleashed? :)

The conversations that spawned from Jeff's post tended to focus on color, sidebars, and bullet points, and I don't think that's fair to either book. Like Petzold, I hope that content is still king. I work ridiculously hard at packing my books with valuable content that anticipates developers' questions and helps them be successful. Perhaps my favorite comment on Jeff's post is by someone (suspiciously) named Adam:

I'm going to beat a nearly-dead horse (I don't think it's fully beaten yet), but using the color samples and the like to describe Nathan's book isn't doing his book justice. The amount of insight he gives on so much of WPF is amazing; I've partially read his .NET and COM book and while the feel of the two books was different, they both provide one important goal: educate the heck out of the reader with information you won't get without a lot of experience. The color samples are nice, the way he puts tips and sidebars is nice, but it's his content that is the shining star. Every other resource I've read on WPF doesn't cut it on the detail of the whys and the hows. Most other books spend too much time giving the "if you write code 'x' then 'y' will happen" and not enough "this is why 'x' causes 'y' to happen."

I also recognize that just as a king usually needs a competent military to survive, content usually needs a good presentation. Do I think that some people are buying my book simply because of the color and scannability rather than my wit, writing style, or qualifications? Absolutely. And I'm okay with that. Otherwise, I wouldn't have worked so hard to enable the syntax coloring and add various text elements that take much more time to create than simple paragraphs. (Yes, making the syntax coloring survive the journey from Visual Studio to the printed page was a lot more work than you might imagine.) I enjoy telling stories where it makes sense, but I know I'm not writing the next Great American Novel. To me, it just makes sense to use bullet points if I feel the need to explain the difference between six enumeration values, for example. I use my books as references all the time, and such elements also help me find what I'm looking for more quickly.

.NET and COM (now 5 years old and printed on demand) is a black & white book with longer code snippets and less scannability. WPF Unleashed (now 4 months old and in its third printing) might soon sell twice as many copies. Why the difference? Maybe it's the subject matter. Maybe it's the intimidating length of .NET and COM. Maybe it's the price difference. Maybe I've become a better writer. Or maybe it's the color and scannability?

Another part of Jeff's post that struck me funny (and got a lot of attention) is:

The Nathan book is brilliant. It reads like a blog and competes toe-to-toe with anything you'd find on the web.

Blogs are brilliant? (Mine certainly isn't.) I understand what he's saying, in that I intentionally wrote in a casual tone (more casual than in .NET and COM). But don't mistake "casual tone" for being sloppy, not giving a ton of thought to content and organization, or lack of authoritative perspective! I don't know what blogs Jeff reads, but If my book read like the blogs I've read, it would look more like this (click for a bigger view):

Overall, I think Jeff's original point was not "Books should have color, sidebars, and bullet points" but simply "Don't judge a book by its cover."

The WPF Challenge

Adam Nathan — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 18:05:00 GMT

Check it out. From the man who thinks I use too many exclamation points! (It's true. I like exclamation points and parentheses!)

WPF Unleashed is flying off the shelves... even the shelf in my office!

Adam Nathan — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 18:15:00 GMT

I suppose I should be flattered. It seems that someone swiped my copy of WPF Unleashed out of my office last week! (Nothing else appears to be missing.) It does have a few identifying marks on it, so the perpetrator better be careful!

At any rate, thanks again to those folks who have given glowing reviews at Amazon and on various blogs (I've seen this, this, this, this, this, this, and this, which Babel Fish helped me translate). It means a lot to me.

Next up, getting the samples translated to VB...

WPF Unleashed is now available!

Adam Nathan — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 00:08:00 GMT

I got my hands on two copies while on vacation and gave them to family members, but now that I'm back home I need to wait for the rest of my copies to arrive. I snooped around the blogosphere and found two references to it:

Adam Nathan's new WPF book is awesome!

WPF Unleashed - New Book from Sams Publishing

Thanks for the nice comments!

Thoughts from the author of cards.dll

Adam Nathan — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 07:43:00 GMT

I got an email the other day that I thought I'd share (with permission from the author and with names removed). This is in reference to my post last year:

Hey - Don't make fun of cards.dll! I wrote it!

Back in the mid 80s (I think - it's been a while) a bunch of guys in the Excel group along with a few other miscellaneous MS employees decided to write a poker server and then we would each write a poker player. We had an interface so the dealer could deal hands to any set of player programs and then the AI in the individual players would bet and we'd see who wrote the best player. Of course we needed a DLL to draw the cards and so one evening I wrote the 50 lines of code or so and called it cards.dll. We were programmers, not artists, so initially we did screen grabs of a DOS solitaire game's cards and used those bitmaps. Later, XXX asked if he could use cards.dll for solitaire. I gave it to him, a bunch of MS artists replaced our highjacked images with the awe inspiring ones you seem very fond of and the rest is history.

They served their purpose, but you're right, they're looking a bit antiquated these days.

WPF Unleashed: The perfect stocking stuffer!

Adam Nathan — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 17:21:00 GMT

This weekend I entered the final phase of tweaking and reviewing, so WPF Unleashed is on the verge of being printed! The book is now scheduled to be available right before the new year (December 27, according to Amazon). Although this isn't quite in time for most of the upcoming holidays, perhaps you now know what to do with any Amazon gift certificates or cash you might receive! Or maybe I should have changed the title of this post to "Reading WPF Unleashed: A New Year's resolution you can actually accomplish!"

There are two things that I'm really excited about that I haven't mentioned before:

It's got an in-depth chapter on 3D by none other than Daniel Lehenbauer, the guy who implemented WPF 3D!
The entire book is printed in full color! Not only does this mean stunning figures, but the C# and XAML (and some C++) has syntax coloring just like in Visual Studio!

Although I like to think that the content is top-notch, if nothing else the book is bound to be the most beautiful .NET book around! I've been really impressed with how well the publishing team has been putting it together. I did a lot of things that made it difficult to produce: the coloring, callouts within figures, callouts within code listings, intricate diagrams, four kinds of sidebars, and so on. It's caused plenty of headaches and late nights, but I think readers will greatly benefit from this extra effort. Below are a few random snapshots of pages (or parts of pages) to whet your appetite...

This one's for John...

Adam Nathan — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 17:39:00 GMT

John said I need to update my blog. Since he's currently my manager, I guess I should listen to him. Things are a *bit* busy with my day job, my night job, and my late night job, so I think I'll consider this update complete. Mission accomplished!