Now that Mix10 has come and gone, I can finally talk about what I’ve been working on for the last few months.  My team, the Advanced Technology Group (ATG), has been working closely with the Windows Phone and XNA Game Studio teams in order to help with gaming on Windows Phone 7 Series.  What does that mean?  I’ve been working with developers for the last few months, gathering information on the phone, and learning the XNA GS4 APIs.

I’m going to share as much as I can of what I’ve learned with the rest of you.  Hopefully, this information will be useful, and will help game developers create even more compelling games on Windows Phone. Michael Klucher and Shawn Hargreaves from the XNA team have a lot of great information on their blogs already. Definitely subscribe to their blogs, if you haven’t already.

The one semi-drawback to working on Windows Phone is that I’m having to cut back the time I spend on audio.  I still hope to stay involved with and continue learning about audio, but I’m going to be spending 80-90 percent of my time on Windows Phone from now on.

So what can you expect to see on the blog going forward?  First, I’m going to cover a number of debugging and profiling tools for XNA development. I gave a 30 minute talk on development and debugging tools at Mix10. Then I’ll cover some techniques for profiling your code, then identifying and removing bottlenecks. Additionally, I’ll be sprinkling in some performance tidbits along the way.

My team provides performance reviews to professional game developers, and we generally produce a lot of developer education materials. As we identify best practices and such for game development on Windows Phone, I’ll share them here on the blog.