January, 2008

Check out this great video showing off the work Cynergy Labs has done using Windows Presentation Foundation, a Wii Remote and some custom gloves.  In just over a week they were able to reproduce the functionality of Microsoft Surface but doing it through hand motions. Awesome!

I got hit with Xbox Live flakiness over the weekend myself.  I had two friends pick up an Xbox for Christmas so this was their first time using XBL.  They both had problems signing up and wound up doing it over the phone.  Then we had problems trying to get a Rockband session going.  After reading the forums I found the work around.  If you loaded up a game and then signed into XBL you could get in.   If you tried to do it from the dashboard you would time out usually. 

This was the first time I have ever run into any hiccups with XBL and that is going back to the original Xbox days.  Needless to say I definitely felt like I had pie in my face this weekend.  But judging from the numbers I am hearing about for new signups I can see why.  Very glad to hear that we are giving something back to the community for the problems that occurred.  Wonder what game it will be...

Here is the blurb from Marc Whitten, GM of Xbox Live:

An Open Letter from Marc Whitten about Xbox LIVE this Holiday

Published January 3, 2008

Dear Xbox LIVE Members:

During this past holiday season you helped us break a number of Xbox LIVE records.  This included our largest sign-up of new members to Xbox LIVE in our 5 year history and just yesterday you broke the record for the single biggest day of concurrent members ever on the service.

As a result of this massive increase in usage we know that some of you experienced intermittent Xbox LIVE issues over the holiday break.  While the service was not completely offline at any given time, we are disappointed in our performance.  I would like to take this moment to thank you each and every one of you for your patience and understanding as our team has worked around the clock to return the service to a stable state.

At the same time we would like to offer a token of our appreciation to all of you in celebration of record success for the service.  And as a thank you for your loyalty during this holiday period, we will be offering all of our Xbox LIVE members around the world access to a full Xbox LIVE Arcade game that will be available to download free of charge.  In the coming weeks we will be sharing the specific details of this offer with you.

Thank you again for helping make Xbox LIVE everything that it is today!

Sincerely,

Marc Whitten

General Manager, Xbox LIVE

Gamertag: Notwen

As originally posted on the Developers for Developers discussion group.  Be sure to check it out today!

One really cool thing I like about Popfly is the mashups you create can be added to your Facebook profile so that your friends can see and use them. These mashups could be anything from placing your photos on an image carousel to a mashup which places your friends on a map and finds the nearest Starbucks.

Here are some live examples on Facebook right now:

Popfly Scribbler:
http://www.facebook.com/add.php?api_key=ed7121d9c77956af1713848384306c9f

John Montgomery's Halo 3 Scoreboard:
"http://apps.facebook.com/popflymashups/Default.aspx?r=johnmont|Halo3 for Facebook"

Another cool thing you can do is download that Popfly mashup you see on Facebook directly into your own Popfly profile and then tweak it however you like! Brad Abrams showed this off during the keynote at Remix Boston. Download this video off Channel9 and skip to about 16 minutes in to check it out!
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=346649#346649

Some more links:

PopFly Facebook Mashups Overview:
http://apps.facebook.com/popflymashups/

Main PopFly Page (Now in Open Public Beta)
http://www.popfly.com

Facebook Development using VB.NET and C#

Looking for some .NET wrappers around the Facebook APIs?

Check out the Facebook Developer Toolkit project here on Codeplex:

http://www.codeplex.com/FacebookToolkit

Example:

using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Collections.ObjectModel;
using Facebook; // remember to add a reference to C:\Program Files\Coding4Fun\Facebook\Binaries\Facebook.dll to your project

namespace f8test
{
class Program
{
private const string apikey = "YOUR API KEY";
private const string apisecret = "YOUR SECRET";

[STAThread]
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Facebook.Components.FacebookService _fbService = new Facebook.Components.FacebookService();
_fbService.ApplicationKey = apikey;
_fbService.Secret = apisecret;

Collection<User> friends = _fbService.GetFriends(); // this will automatically trigger _fbService.ConnectToFacebook()
foreach (User u in friends) {
Console.WriteLine(u.Name);
}
}
}
}

Technorati Tags: Facebook Development, PopFly, Developers for Developers, Devs4Devs

 

Are you a WPF guru?  Got some background in Financial Services? Would you like to get exposure in front of the entire devcon audience? How about being published in the Financial Services Magazine, free hotel stay in nyc for the devcon, a zune and an xbox elite+games??

Be sure you hop on over to the Lab 49 contest site today and check it out!