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Meet the teams who will compete at the Canadian Imagine Cup Finals April 13th, 2013. The winning team at the Canadian finals will represent Canada at the world finals in St Petersburg, Russia! Last week judges played games, explored Kinect projects, and evaluated a variety of entries in Canada’s...

Unity now has an open beta for Windows Store apps, and there is a two day training event to help you build games with Unity for the Windows Store. Last week Unity announced the availability of Unity 4.2 as an open beta for Windows store apps . Let’s take a quick look at how this affects you! Where do...

Learn about HTML gaming, talk to a VC to learn about funding for start-ups, join the hackathon, learn about Windows 8 design, or how to use Azure for free websites or to give you back end services for iOS, Windows8, or Windows Phone, all this and more at Windows 8 Pure Imagination Microsoft with partner...

The Imagine Cup game category has changed this year and will allow more game developers to participate! In the past the Imagine Cup game categories required students to design games that fit an Imagine Cup theme of helping others. This resulted in some wonderful games that educated and inspired us...

EaselJS is a JavaScript library that provides an API that will be familiar to Flash developers to make it easier to work with canvas. HTML5 is supported in Internet Explorer 9 and higher, and other modern web browsers. You can build native apps for Windows 8 with HTML5 . The great thing about this broad...

Good news for gamers trying to support multiple platforms, GameSalad is adding support for Windows 8 GameSalad has announced they are going to bring Windows 8 app store publishing to GameSalad creator. So what is GameSalad? It’s a tool that allows you to build games and will generate code from your design...

This year’s Imagine Cup finals are in Russia, and there are lots of ways a Windows 8 app could get you to the finals. You are going to see a lot of Windows 8 events and resources over the next few months as we approach the release of Windows 8 RTM. What’s really cool for students is the fact that if...

Not only can you now play HTML5 Atari games you can build your own! We’ve got code and workshops to help! Okay I am going to admit to my age for a moment. I remember bugging my dad to buy me Pong. Pong was released in 1972 and Atari released and inspired many generations of gamers and game developers...

The categories in Imagine Cup are more flexible than ever! Taking a project course? Building a game? Got a good business idea? Your code could take you to world finals in St. Petersburg Russia! They just announced the rules and competitions for Imagine Cup 2013 and this is the year to enter! We’re still...

In addition to the Windows 8 events coming up, we’ve got a couple of great Azure workshops coming up as well! Adding Azure to your Windows 8 app can take it to the next level. Jump to Event listing Windows 8 provides a great opportunity for developers, and last week I talked about the app excellence...

Ever wondered what life is like for an independent game developer? Microsoft Student Partner Jessica Pellow interviews Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky about their film “Indie Game: the movie” a film selected for the 2012 Sundance Film Festival that follows the stories of four game developers...

It’s not too late to enter the Windows Phone Game Design category for Imagine Cup, just register and submit a summary of the game you plan to build before 23:59 GMT February 14th Warning! 23:59 GMT means 19:59 Atlantic, 18:59 Eastern, and 15:59 Pacific so I suggest you get this submitted on the weekend...

Part 2 of this 5-part blog post series on success strategies in the Windows Phone Marketplace deals with a fairly unique component to the Windows Phone platform called Trial Mode .  If you make use of trial mode in your paid apps and games (and you really, really should if you plan on putting a...

3 students from Carleton share what they learned building their first Windows Phone Game Check out more tips from fellow students here Could you briefly describe your application/game? Tile Tank is a puzzle game, and it’s all about finding a viable path across a variety of obstacle courses...

Compass Rose Studios, composed of four students from Carleton university built a flight game for Windows Phone and share what they learned Check out more tips from fellow students here Could you briefly describe your application/game? Airborne is a fast paced 3D adventure game that takes modern...

Tyler Pearce, a student from Carleton university shares what he learned developing a Windows Phone game with his team. Check out more tips from fellow students here Could you briefly describe your application/game? The game is called ChopChop , you play the role of a chef. Players must use phone...

Just a short note because, aside from an urge to use alliteration, I wanted to share with you a cool success story. Microsoft Game Studios just published a new game called Hasta La Muerte by Pohlm Studios. Why did I want to tell you about it? Because Frederic Pedro, from France, created Pohlm studios...

If you’re still unconvinced by the posts on this blog or resources elsewhere that getting started with Windows Phone 7 game development is not that difficult, then here’s another neat little tool for you – a ready-to-go game engine for the tower defense genre.   ScriptTD is a high-level engine that...

If you haven’t yet done so, be sure to check out Microsoft’s FUSE Labs ( http://fuse.microsoft.com/ ). FUSE (Future Social Experiences) produces some pretty neat projects that deal with social, real-time and media-rich experiences. Among their notable projects is Docs for Facebook , a...

Did you know that as a student, you have access to lots of freebies on http://www.dreamspark.com/ ? Need more development power than Visual Studio 2010 Express can offer? Want to get access to the full Microsoft Expression Studio suite? DreamSpark is the solution! DreamSpark provides students with various...

If you’re not already using Windows Azure somehow in your applications, I’m sure you’ve been hearing more and more about how Windows Azure can help you build applications faster by focusing on development and not infrastructure or how it can help you respond faster to customer needs by having infrastructure...

In case you missed it, the Great Canadian Apportunity ( http://www.greatcanadianapportunity.ca ) is now over and the winner has been announced! The Grand Prize winner will receive a whopping $10,000. The first runner up will enjoy a Mesh 2011 Conference Pack worth $3,000 along with a Windows Phone 7...

Introducing XNA: A tri-platform game development framework – Part 3 In parts 1 and 2 of this series, we setup a multiplatform XNA solution that deploys to the PC, Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7 devices seamlessly. In this 3 rd and final part of the series, we’ll implement platform-specific...

Introducing XNA: A tri-platform game development framework – Part 2 In part 1 of this series, we set up a tri-platform XNA solution that can be deployed to three platforms simultaneously. While the cornflower blue screen we saw in the previous part is a truly breathtaking achievement,...

Bite-Sized Lessons, A Great Single-Screen Experience This combination video and text tutorial set teaches basic 2D game development on Windows, Xbox 360, and Windows Phone 7 using XNA Game Studio 4.0 my be found here Videos are each less than 5 minutes in length Accessible with a web browser...