Jerry Nixon , swell fella that he is, pointed out a great blog to me that details Expression Blend Behaviors.  But you have to check out his blog: http://blog.jerrynixon.com/2012/02/mango-sample-give-your-app-finger.html He explains that one of my...

The top 5 game ideas that I have for the Windows Phone that use Azure would be: Board games: Start your design process with paper and pencil, then use simple databases to implement the game logic and scoring, move these to the...

Ever want to make clouds and then use them in your phone app? Here is a quick way to use Expression Design (or a similar tool you know how to use) to make clouds. We will then change the clouds into a Usercontrol and then use it in Blend. Once the code...

Where do games live?  I like to ask that question and then watch the audience.  Most people know that a game arrives in their house and then they play it, maybe they take it to GameStop and sell it.  Otherwise, who cares? That means that...

Cloning?  No kidding. In this blog we will clone an ellipse, connect the two clones and then use path operations to create an interesting object. To begin: Open Expression Design, the canvas can be any size. The table below gives a pretty much step...

Earlier today I wrote the following entry (with links included, now removed) Sweet free book on HTML 5 game programming!  If you are patient, Addison-Wesley tries to get you buy a subscription to get the “fast” download.  They make you wait...

Reasons given in no particular order: Scalable CPU, so if you get those 20,000 users suddenly paying for a subscription, you can handle it Scalable Leaderboard, everyone wants to know how they rate against the other players, even with goofy games, especially...

We all know that guy who is always gaming the system, it’s so irritating, you don’t quite know how he does it, and his career kind of sucks, but somehow he figures it out. Of course in software there are a lot of people who game the system...

Why bother with Expression Design and convert a perfectly good image from PNG to XAML and then have to make into a usercontrol in Expression Blend?  Why I ask you?  Isn’t this just an added step? Umm, good question oh writer of this blog.  ...

Jerry Nixon is a team mate of mine and a funnier guy you would have difficulty finding, outside of Kenny Spade another team mate of mine. If you were in 6th grade with either of these guys you would likely get gigged for deportment, but have fun getting...

This is sooo cool, you have got to get this Free Water Scroll Viewer and play with it.  Totally mind blowing if you add it to your application. I am working on figuring out how to add this to a phone application, love the look. http://gallery.expression...

This is a freaking awesome tool for checking your Xaml quickly and it’s free.  Check it out at: XamlPadX 4.0

In my other blog I have been covering a number of Tombstoning articles: A general article about Tombstoning: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/devschool/archive/2012/01/09/tombstoning-in-windows-phone-7.aspx A poorly titled article, but useful if you don’t know...

Oh this is amazing!  The Sensor Research folks have come up with a really cool 3D system, and so my prediction, maybe as late as last week that 3D interactive suites was dead, the prediction is dead.  Wow. Check out the video:  

Weird, the Chrome fans seem to think that IE9 doesn’t support video.  But the following site seems to indicate that IE 9 does support video: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/hh410106.aspx#_HTML5_video_audio Ok, it’s a Microsoft site, but the site...

Wow, I remember wearing out a few of the K&R books, and for the old people like me you know what I mean.  Although I was much more of a BASIC programmer, as much of my work early on was in test systems and BASIC was used a lot on those machines...

Wow, can a Mac shop do silverlight development?  Is Expression Blend better than Flash?  Zoom over to the URL to read an older article about a Mac only shop that gave Silverlight a try.  http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/ee662147 Now...

Oh, what a weekend, a great session at DeVry University, hardworking students find out how to create and post Windows Phone Apps! I think that XNA is the way to go for Windows Phone 7, but not everyone agrees with that opinion. And I agree, so let’s...

Every once in awhile I look around for a Silverlight Game Engine.  When I do a search and I get the Popfly Game Engine toward the top of the search return, it shows that there isn’t much activity.  Why?  Popfly is dead.  The engine...

I keep trying to write this post but just can’t get a solid start.  So stick with me, no matter what, I am posting something. HTML 5 only supports one kind of shape: rectangle.  To draw other shapes you need to use paths like an arc. Let’s draw...

In game design the designer and player/s are in a special kind of relationship, the game designer is the player advocate.  An abusive games would be a game that “...recast the nature of play as a dialogic interplay between player and designer.” ...

Playability and usability are two different things, but are closely related, here are some heuristics that could be used in creating a game survey. Is the player’s time wasted? Does the game handle interruptions Can the player control...

Ok, you have been working on your game, maybe you turned into for a grade at school, or you got it up on AppHub.  Your best friend doesn’t want to talk about the game, seriously, they walked away from you the last time you brought it up.  How...

Wow, create Windows Phone 7 based games using only your phone!  Really?  Seriously!  Awesome! First get a Windows Phone 7, Verizon (HTC Trophy, $99 with 2-year contract, monthly charges of course): http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store...

I have no idea why anyone would want to use VC++ with Kinect, especially since I think that Kodu is rather low level for how I think programming should be done. Oh well, I know that there are people out that are into that C++ stuff. Greg Duncan has written...