After over four years as an Academic Developer Evangelist at Microsoft, I have been blessed with an incredible opportunity to take on a new challenge. Effective June 13, I will be working in Microsoft Game Studios as Community Manager for the Kinect team...

This morning, Microsoft announced the finalists for the various competitions in the Imagine Cup. Since I am a co-captain of the Windows Phone 7 competition I will post those results here. Major congratulations to the teams who advanced: Korea HOMERUN...

I’m at the Imagine Cup US Finals here today in my home base of Bellevue, WA, and I am presenting a session soon on designing musical instruments with Windows Phone 7. First and foremost I want to give a shout out to Grant Kot . Grant is a student at Julliard...

What I’ve Been Working On Between Imagine Cup, writing apps and games, developing tutorials, speaking at Web Camps, doing university visits, and just generally keeping busy, I’ve been working on a real doozy behind the scenes and I will be doing a tutorial...

Students do incredible stuff, especially in the Imagine Cup. To see what I’m talking about, visit this page on Facebook: https://apps.facebook.com/imaginecupcontest You can vote every day. Make sure to check out each of the teams, read about their projects...

I just released a new application which I wrote to help me monitor my progress through P90X, a very very effective workout program that I’ve been doing for the last 6-7 weeks. I started this exercise and diet routine after seeing tons of friends and family...

Congratulations to all of our fantastic Round 1 competitors in the Imagine Cup – Windows Phone 7 competition! The submissions were fantastic and the entries were incredibly competitive, to say the least. The teams really brought some great ideas to the...

I quickly realized that I posted something for another blog to this one by mistake. My apologies if you had to read through my personal P90X stuff. Anyway, I have been working on learning some great new stuff with XNA and Windows Phone 7. I have a 3D...

You may remember a while ago when we had the i’m campaign that would donate money based on causes you were interested in. It’s back with Badges in Messenger 2011! To activate a badge, click your name in Messenger and choose Personalize –> Change Badge...

Boy, if that’s not an attention-grabbing headline, I don’t know what is. Thanks Randy Guthrie , I totally poached your idea for this post title. About a week ago I was driving up to Snoqualmie Pass, elevation 3,022, in the Cascades for a little recreation...

I have had the pleasure of reviewing a new book called 3D Graphics with XNA Game Studio 4.0 by Sean James. This book looks very promising so far and I’ll continue to report what I learn about it. Since many of the folks I work with at Microsoft are in...

This past Saturday, I was involved in a presentation to over 180 developers at the Silicon Valley Web Camp event, a free training event for developers run by Microsoft. I presented a session on data access and co-presented some follow-up sessions with...

Tomorrow is the Round 1 deadline to enter for the Imagine Cup competition in the U.S. If you want to compete this year, you need to submit for this very easy, unjudged round. Here are three very simple steps to follow to be a part of the biggest global...

What is it? You’ve probably seen me blog about the fantastic Imagine Cup competition more than a few times here. Occasionally, we get feedback that putting together a software design team is made more difficult with the acquisition of software. Now, for...

This may be a precursor to something bigger… I’m working on what I think will be a pretty cool game for the marketplace, and I’ll share the source code here eventually. Right now I had to conceptually understand something: how to draw a cube using only...

I’ve just finished my miniseries on integrating Windows Phone 7, Windows Azure, SQL Azure, WCF and Push Notifications into a single package! This is my index post, so you can easily get to the other articles. Check out the demo video below. Both videos...

Looking Back Over the course of this series, we’ve built a SQL Azure database, a Windows Azure worker role, and a WCF web role hosted in Azure. We are fully cloud-enabled at this point! Although, you’ll likely be running this all in the development fabric...

In the last post, we learned how to write an Azure worker role to poll stocks from the Yahoo! Finance service for a particular user and send them a push notification. It works, trust me; it’s just that we have no way of knowing because there is no data...

Don’t get me wrong; I love the Twitter Notify plugin that you can download for Live Writer (which is itself the most amazing piece of software in existence today). However, I track almost all of my stuff through a bit.ly account and I tweet about every...

Taking a little break from your regularly scheduled Cloud Series blog post to bring you an interstitial meta-post about blogging! I love Windows Live Writer; I mean I really love it. It’s a great piece of software. One thing I miss is the Twitter Notify...

Bitly Tweeter had a minor update today. It now allows you to customize how your blog posts appear by default. Check out the new settings page: Download Bit.ly Tweeter 1.2 Beta here . Please rate and review By the way, expect this to go live on plugins...

I just finished up the beta of this Windows Live Writer plugin. It automatically uses bit.ly to shorten your post URL using your bit.ly account so you can track it later, and then sends a tweet. This supports the new(ish) Twitter OAuth workflow, so you...

Introduction This is a pretty common task in any financial app. Though usually you’d only poll stocks every 15 minutes, it makes sense to put it in a worker role so that you can send push notifications to your users when a stock goes through the roof...

Understanding the Data Model In most learning scenarios it is helpful to understand and define the data you are working with before anything else. To get to this step, we’ll lay out a few features of the mini-product we’ll build. The system is intended...

The need for cloud computing (or at least an understanding of it) Windows Phone 7 supports “smart” multitasking, which means that third party applications have to manage their own state and cannot run in the background (except for some apps which can...