Published on Friday, June 24, 2011 8:46:32 AM UTC in
Programming
If you are interested in Silverlight 5 and its new 3D graphics capabilities, you probably know about the available samples on MSDN. One of them is the Housebuilder sample John Papa first presented during MIX11. For quite some time I've been struggling with this particular sample, because all I got when I tried to run it on various computers was this:
Published on Tuesday, June 21, 2011 8:52:42 AM UTC in
Programming
This is the third part of my article series to prepare you for Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 exam which will be available starting July 14th. For a short introduction and overview of the exam as well as a list of general learning materials please take a look at the first article. The official outline of the measured skills breaks down the topics into the following parts:
Published on Tuesday, June 21, 2011 8:00:00 AM UTC in
Programming
& Tools
If you are actively using my debug helper Add-in for Visual Studio which I released last fall, you may be pleased to learn that I've uploaded a new version. And if you're not using it yet, I invite you to take a look at it.
Published on Monday, June 20, 2011 9:23:00 AM UTC in
Programming
In the last part of this series we've taken a look at one of the major new features in the upcoming Mango update for Windows Phone: integrating Silverlight and XNA in the same application, which is a thrilling opportunity for both normal application developers to enrich their applications with 2D/3D graphics content as well as game developers to simplify development of menus and other screens that require a rich user interface. In this part we'll take a look at the other new features Mango will bring that are particularly interesting to game developers. Remember that you need the beta version of the developer tools if you want to try any of these features yourself. You can read the full article on Silverlight Show.
Published on Tuesday, June 14, 2011 2:33:00 PM UTC in
Programming
This is the second part of my article series to prepare you for Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 exam that will be available starting July 14th. For a short introduction and overview of the exam as well as a list of general learning materials please take a look at the first article. The official outline of the measured skills breaks down the topics into the following parts:
Published on Wednesday, June 8, 2011 12:37:23 PM UTC in
Programming
Although it'll take some months until the final release, the upcoming update for the Windows Phone 7 platform has already drawn a lot of attention, both in the developer community as well as for customers. We were able to see demonstrations of some of the new features early, for example at Microsoft's conference MIX, but the real excitement started when a beta version of the developer tools was released to the public a few weeks ago. In this article we'll take a look at what will change regarding game development; and if you haven't had time to get your teeth into the upcoming features and improvements yet, you'll be surprise just how much is in the box for us with this update. You can read the full text over at Silverlight Show.
Published on Tuesday, June 7, 2011 5:45:27 PM UTC in
Programming
Microsoft's certification exam 70-599 for its new mobile platform is named "Designing and Developing Windows Phone 7 Applications" and will be published on July 14th, 2011. In this new article series I'm writing for Silverlight Show I will try to bring you up to speed to take the exam once it is available. Of course you can also use the info and resources as a basis to plan your own, self-paced learning to prepare for the exam at a later point. You can read the first part about "Designing Data Access Strategies" here. If you have any feedback or suggestions, feel free to leave any comments there, or contact me.
Published on Friday, May 27, 2011 10:42:00 PM UTC in
Programming
Update 2011-09-30: This article is compatible with the final version of Windows Phone 7.1 "Mango".
Published on Wednesday, May 25, 2011 8:40:18 AM UTC in
Programming
An often discussed topic on Windows Phone 7 is that of "tombstoning", which describes the process of your application being suspended and removed from the running processes (think hibernate) to free resources on the phone. The application can be "revived" later when the user navigates back to it. It's the developer's responsibility to create a user experience that gives the appearance of a seamless transition between applications even when tombstoning happens. For games, the basic concept is the same as for other applications; however, the implementation is done in a slightly different way. In this article, we learn about the differences between conventional Silverlight applications and games developed in XNA with regards to this concept. As always, you can read it over at Silverlight Show.
Published on Wednesday, May 25, 2011 7:32:00 AM UTC in
Programming
Update 2011-09-30: This article is compatible with the final version of Windows Phone 7.1 "Mango".
