March, 2011

The Windows Phone Team’s Brandon Watson gave out the number behind Windows Phone 7, and I thought I’d spice it up with some graphics. Enjoy!

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

I just picked up the ebook version of the latest book on Windows Phone game development: Wrox’ Professional Windows Phone 7 Game Development, written by Chris G. Williams (@chrisgwilliams on Twitter) and George W. Clingerman (@clingermangw on Twitter). Both authors are XNA MVPs and have written a great deal about XNA online, which makes them choice authors for a book on making games for WP7.

Among the topics covered in the book are:

• Dealing with device orientation and the accelerometer
• Touch input: detecting touch, handling gestures and the SIP (virtual keyboard)
• Building a user input management system
• Game state management
• Playing and recording audio
• Building a base game template
• 3D graphics and effects
• Push notifications
• Accessing web services
• Accessing the camera
• Trial mode

From my initial skim of the book, it looks like a pretty good guide for the developer who’s looking to get into game development on Windows Phone, and as I write this, there are a couple of Amazon reviewers who’d agree with me.

Both the dead-tree and ebook versions of  Professional Windows Phone 7 Game Development are available directly from Wrox for USD$44.99 (CAD$43.72 as of this writing).

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

As of today, connecting Windows Azure to your application running on Windows Phone 7 just got a whole lot easier with the release of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 designed to make it easier for you to leverage the cloud services running in Windows Azure. The toolkit, which you can find on CodePlex, includes Visual Studio project templates for Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure, class libraries optimized for use on the phone, sample applications, and documentation.

The toolkit contains the following resources:

• Binaries – Libraries that you can use in your Windows Phone 7 applications to make it easier to work with Windows Azure (e.g. a full storage client library for blobs and tables). You can literally add these libraries to your existing Windows Phone 7 applications and immediate start leveraging services such as Windows Azure storage.
• Docs – Documentation that covers setup and configuration, a review of the toolkit content, getting started, and some troubleshooting tips.
• Project Templates – VSIX (which is the unit of deployment for a Visual Studio 2010 Extension) files are available that create project templates in Visual Studio, making it easy for you to build brand new applications.
• Samples – Sample application that fully leverages the toolkit, available in both C# and VB.NET.  The sample application is also built into one of the two project templates created by the toolkit.

There’s a really great article on how to get started in the wiki. Definitely check that out before you get started. To help make it even easier to get started with the toolkit, today’s (3/25) Cloud Cover episode will focus on the toolkit and how to get started using it. Over the next few weeks, videos, tutorials, demo scripts, and other great resources to go along with the toolkit will be released. Stay tuned here – I’ll keep you posted with all the new stuff as soon as it becomes available!

Want more?
If those resources aren’t enough to get you started, make sure to stop by Wade Wegner’s blog (a fellow evangelist) for a quick “how to get started" tutorial.

Get Windows Azure free for 30 days

As a reader of the Canadian Mobile Developers’ blog, you can get free access to Windows Azure for 30 days while you’re trying out the toolkit. Go to windowsazurepass.com, select Canada as your country, and enter the promo code CDNDEVS.

If you think you need more than 30 days, no problem. Sign up for the Introductory Special instead. From now until June 30, you’ll get 750 hours per month free!

If you have an MSDN subscription, you have Windows Azure hours included as part of your benefits. Sign in to MSDN and go to your member’s benefits page to activate your Windows Azure benefits.

T-Mobile, in the States, used Windows Azure as the backend for their mobile application Family Room (you can read further in the whitepaper Mobile Operator Speeds Time-to-Market for Innovative Social Networking Solution published on Microsoft Case Studies). Now, you can bring the same concepts home to Canada by extending your mobile applications to the Windows Azure platform. If you haven’t done any work with Windows Azure yet, I invite you to check out AzureFest, a hands-on educational event designed by Canada’s own MVPs Cory Fowler (@SyntaxC4) and Barry Gervin (@bgervin) from ObjectSharp. At AzureFest, you’ll see how developing and deploying applications to Windows Azure is fast and easy, leveraging the skills you already have (.NET, Java, PHP, or Ruby) and the tools you already know (Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc.).

AzureFest sessions are focused around web applications using .NET and Visual Studio, but the concepts are the same for mobile applications. You’ll learn everything to you need to know to get up and running with Windows Azure quickly including:

• Overview of Cloud Computing and Windows Azure
• Setting up the Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio
• Setting up your Windows Azure account
• Migrating a traditional on-premise ASP.NET MVC application to the Cloud
• Deploying solutions to Windows Azure

You can use the learnings from AzureFest to migrate your mobile application’s backend services, if they exist, to Windows Azure or now have the background knowledge required for your next mobile application so that it can leverage the power of Windows Azure.

AzureFest is a hands-on event. This means that you’ll be following along in your own development environment and actually deploying your solution during the event. In order to get the most out of the experience, you’ll need to bring a laptop with you that is running Windows Vista SP1 or Windows 7 with the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio installed. If you don’t have Visual Studio, that’s not a problem. The Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio will help you download Visual Studio Express for free.

You’ll also need to bring a credit card. Windows Azure activations require a credit card even for the trial period, but don’t worry, nothing will be charged to your credit card as the last part of the event shows you how to take down all of your Windows Azure instances.

We’re taking AzureFest across Canada, and will be coming to a city near you. Check out the listings below to get all the information you need about each of the cities. Don’t see a city that’s near you? Keep checking back as we will be adding more cities and dates as we confirm them. If you’d like to help organize an AzureFest in your city or at your user group, please contact me via email, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

Make sure you register early as space is limited. Make sure to find me when you’re are the event – it will be an opportunity for us to chat about what you’re working on, possible projects to move to the Cloud, and how I can help you take your applications and skills to the Cloud.