Windows Phone Unleashed

All Day of Hands on Programming, B.Y.O. Laptop!

Windows Phone 7 is HOT! Come check out Windows Phone 7 Unleashed for everything you need to know to develop for WP7. Whether you're a seasoned veteran or you're just starting with .NET development, there's something in it for you. The first half of this deep dive event is lecture and hands on lab. At the half point mark of the day, you'll have a solid foundation for building WP7 applications. The second half of the day is going straight to code. (there maybe some phones given away too)

Build an app and win from $800 in prizes

• 1st Place: $500 Gift Card
• 2nd Place: $200 Gift Card
• 3rd Place: $100 Gift Card

Free Marketplace Tokens

A limited amount of complimentary tokens are available for those submitting their application to the Windows Phone Marketplace. Organizers of each event will collect names of those interested.

Limited Seating

In order to deliver the best possible experience for attendees, seating at these events is VERY limited. Register NOW!

Seattle, WA - April 20th - Apps at Microsoft Westlake/Terry offices
Portland, OR - April 27th - Games at Microsoft Portland Office
Boise, ID - May 18th - Games - Microsoft Boise Office
Bellevue, WA - June 1st - Games - Bellevue Civica Office

LINE OF BUSINESS APPS (Just April 20th Session)

Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Programming

In this session, we start with a discussion of windows phone, the architecture changes made from 6.5 to 7.0, the hardware specifications and then move into the beginnings of building a WP7 application including...

• 1.Application life cycle
• 2.Hardware Foundation
• 3.Files associated with project template
• 4.Splash screen and the importance of 1 second / 19 second loading
• 5.Application Bar
• 6.Panorama and Pivot controls
• 7.MVVM
• 8.Marketplace

Connecting to Services

In this session, we will discuss how Cloud Services help to bring power to the phone. We will be binding to a rest based services and show how to search and display the information received. In this session we will also talk about Navigation, passing information between screens, while working with List and detail information.

• 1.Navigation
• 2.Location
• 3.JSON Deserialization
• 4.Bing Maps
• 5.Isolated Storage
• 6.Binding Sample Data
• 7.Navigation

Recording Data

In this session we will be adding to our knowledge and learn the importance of live tiles. We will show you how to set up a periodic agent and how to set up and read and write to a SQL Database on Windows Phone.

• 1. Live Tiles
• 2. SQL CE
• 3. Background Processes and Periodic Agents
• 4. Launchers and Choosers

GAMES DEVELOPMENT

Introduction to XNA

XNA Game Basics

• 1. What is XNA
• 2. Game Development Tools
• 3. XNA Game Projects
• 4. XNA Game Loop
• 5. Debugging

Games Working with Images, Sounds and Text

• 1. Working with Textures
• 2. Playing Songs and Sound Effects
• 3. Drawing text with SpriteFonts

Getting User Input

• 1. Getting input on the phone
• 2. Using the Accelerometer
• 3. Using Touch Game State Management

Managing Game Play

• 1. Keeping Score
• 2. Tracking Health and Lives
• 3. Adding Levels

Managing Screens

• 1. Creating Multi-Screen games
• 2. Loading content in the background
• 3. How to pause the game

Managing State

• 1. Phone Application Lifecycle
• 2. Supporting Fast Application Switching
• 3. Persisting and Restoring State

Silverlight and XNA Integration

• 1. Introduction to Silverlight
• 2. Silverlight and XNA Integration
• 3. Creating a Silverlignt and XNA Game

Advanced XNA Games

Marketplace and Advertisements

• 1. Understanding the Windows Phone Marketplace
• 2. Submitting your Game to the Marketplace
• 3. Adding Advertisements to your game

3D Games

• 1. 3D Support in XNA
• 2. Creating a simple 3D Game

Multi-Platform Games

• 1. Building Games for Phone, PC and XBOX
• 2. Other Multi-Platform options

Cloud Integration

• 1. Using Windows Azure
• 2. Social Gaming Toolkit

for more information http://www.winphoneunleashed.com/

Interact and Seattle Silverlight Videos Online

in the 5 minutes of free time I have each month I finally managed to get some videos that were takening with a flip cam at some of the local user group meetings posted on vimeo:


Summer Series Touch and Beyond: The Psychology of Future Interactions
http://www.vimeo.com/14095704

Summer Series - Windows Phone 7 Development Going Deeper (Session 2)
http://www.vimeo.com/14101547

10 Ways to Attack a Design Problem And Come Out Winning
http://www.vimeo.com/14105139

Accessibility Makes the Experience More Usable by More People - IxDA Interact
http://www.vimeo.com/14125563

Modern UX Creation from the Eyes of a Developer
http://www.vimeo.com/14370107

Silverlight Connections - Vegas Nov 1-4

got asked to speak at SilverlightConnections in Vegas in Nov. :) topics include: 'Breaking Down Walls – The Story of Getting designers and developers working together in an Agency Environment' and 'Multi Dos and Don’t touches –Multi Touch Development from the trenches' and 'Going from Silverlight to Phone 7 Silverlight Application Development'

http://www.devconnections.com/shows/FALL2010ASP/default.asp?s=151


Title: Breaking Down Walls – The Story of Getting designers and developers working together in an Agency Environment
Type: Regular session
Category: Expression Blend
Level: 300 -- Advanced

Abstract: Breaking Down Walls is about the wall between designers and developers in the typical design shop. Getting everyone to cross over, communicate and build better UX is where we are going and where many of the best Interactive Design firms are already. When designers and developers learn to communicate, and work together they really start to be able to make the best use of the tools they have from Adobe to Expression to Visual Studio, all these tools can be used in an open collaborative environment like never before. Learn to make magic here or at least learn how it has been done at Wirestone and other agencies that have done it successfully.

Title: Multi Dos and Don’t touches –Multi Touch Development from the trenches
Type: Regular session
Category: Architecture, Patterns and Practices
Level: 300 -- Advanced

Abstract: David talks about his experience in the retail space with real world multi-touch applications from touch kiosks to Surface and Silverlight. David will talk about the customer experience and how user centered design and multi-touch work in the retail world with ‘live’ customers as well as the perspective of designers, developers, IA and others regarding multi-touch. From stories about developers touching too much and about good ideas gone amuck David gets it all out on the table.

Title: Going from Silverlight to Phone 7 Silverlight Application Development
Type: Regular session
Category: Windows Phone 7
Level: 200 -- Intermediate

Abstract: This session is about making the leap to Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 and using your Silverlight Skills to build cool Silverlight applications for Windows Phone 7. We'll talk about the basics, game development and even business(ish) apps for Phone 7.

Getting Developers and Designers to play nice... and MIX

For those of you that don't know MIX is the most important Microsoft related conference of the year. Also MIX has decided to have an open call this year for speakers... and the Public gets to vote... in an effort to get my sessions to the top of the list I'm emailing everyone in my contact list to ask your help in voting for my sessions... :)

Here are the steps:


1. Click http://visitmix.com/opencallvote/Entry?entryId=BREAKI077

2. Click ‘add to ballot’

3. Click ‘Submit Your Ballot’

If you have more time start here:

1. http://tinyurl.com/ye9uzwz

and then add all 3 sessions and vote them

Please and Thank you. and feel free to get all your friends to vote too…

For those of you that want more information here are the abstracts... normally you just send them to the people organizing a show but this year they are making everyone vote... :( or maybe this is a good thing... I guess it depends on if I get selected... ;)

Here are the 3 topics:

Title: Breaking Down Walls – The Story of Getting designers and developers working together in an Agency Environment

Abstract: Breaking Down Walls is about the wall between designers and developers in the typical design shop. Getting everyone to cross over, communicate and build better UX is where we are going and where many of the best Interactive Design firms are already. When designers and developers learn to communicate, and work together they really start to be able to make the best use of the tools they have from Adobe to Expression to Visual Studio, all these tools can be used in an open collaborative environment like never before. Learn to make magic here or at least learn how it has been done at Wirestone and other agencies that have done it successfully.

Title: Multi Dos and Don’t touches –Multi Touch Development from the trenches

Abstract: David talks about his experience in the retail space with real world multi-touch applications from touch kiosks to Surface and Silverlight. David will talk about the customer experience and how user centered design and multi-touch work in the retail world with ‘live’ customers as well as the perspective of designers, developers, IA and others regarding multi-touch. From stories about developers touching too much and about good ideas gone amuck David gets it all out on the table.

Title: Hacking Silverlight 4

Abstract: From MVVM for Tard’s to hosting Silverlight in WPF and getting around silly security sandbox’s, this session is about pushing the limits of Silverlight and making things easier to do. With a ‘It shouldn’t be that hard’ attitude to development some of the best work in Silverlight can sometimes be a bit of a hack and this session will talk about some of the most useful hacks. From using external hosts, the DOM bridge and even flash; Silverlight can do just about anything given half a chance or a few hacks.

again that link is http://tinyurl.com/ye9uzwz please vote for me :)

Don't Forget about Silverlight Week

So this coming week is really really exciting and I wanted to make sure no one forgot. The stars have aligned and 4 big events are all happening in Seattle:

Monday:
.NET Developer Association User Group Meeting - Featuring Jesse Liberty
http://www.dotnetda.com/Events/EventNewsletter.aspx?EventDate=9/14/2009

Tuesday
Silverlight Geek Dinner
http://adamkinney.com/Blog/silverlight-geek-dinner-sep-15th-seattleredmondbellevue

Wed
Interact Seattle - Featuring Tim Hueur
http://www.InteractSeattle.org/

Thur
Silverlight 3 Firestarter Event
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032422412&Culture=en-US

MSDN Webcast: geekSpeak: Composite Application Development (Level 200)

Start Date: Wednesday, August 19, 2009 12:00 PM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Duration: 60 minutes
Audience: developer

In this geekSpeak, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) David Kelley discusses composite application development in Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). He covers the Silverlight Designer/Developer workflow, tooling, design patterns, anti-practices, and working with distributed teams. Your hosts for this geekSpeak are Glen Gordon and Mithun Dhar.

The geekSpeak webcast series brings you industry experts in a "talk-radio" format hosted by developer evangelists from Microsoft. These experts share their knowledge and experience about a particular developer technology and are ready to answer your questions in real time during the webcast. To ask a question in advance of the live webcast, or for post-show resources, be sure to visit the geekSpeak blog.

Guest Presenter: David Kelley, Senior Software Architect, IdentityMine

David Kelley is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Microsoft Silverlight, and he has been building Web-based, distributed applications for more than ten years. He is a Silverlight user experience architect at IdentityMine, and his passion is building user experiences that are elegant and easy to use. David's career highlights include a Silverlight demonstration with Bill Gates at TechEd 2008, and developing the "Entertainment Tonight" Web site for the Silverlight 1 launch and Emmy Awards. In his spare time, David is the executive officer of the Seattle Designer Developer Interaction Group.


Click Here to Register

Flex Flash Smack Down and maybe some Silverlight

Last night was the Seattle Designer Developer Interaction Group (user group) meeting. its a user group focused on UX and the designer developer experience. We meet in downtown bellevue. Last night Yoeun Pen was our guest speaker and a did a great presentation on Flex/Flash. Granted we were bolted out of the board room by the local construction cure and we had to play ninja and come up with a venue on the fly but some a miracle (ie, talked to hotel that we have our room booked with normally) we got to use a better room near by (about 100feet). We had a great turn out and a great dicussion on the tools for designers vs the Flex IDE. I was pleased to learn that the designer developer story is better then some of the other technologies we looked at but not as clean as WPF/Silverlight.

Yoeun Pen covered a number of things including:

• What is Flex?
• MXML (flash version of Xaml)
• Flash/Flex 4?
• Flex SDK
• Flex Builder
• Flash vs Flex
• Components
• Embedding assets
• Skinning

and he did a great job contrasting Flash and flex and compairing that with Silverlight/WPF. You can download the powerpoint at:

http://www.HackingSilverlight.net/Downloads/FlexFlash.zip

Yoeun's blog is at:

http://www.nationleprechaun.com/

Hope to see everyone at the next SD2IG about the latest topic related to UX.

MSDN Events Unleashed: Best of MIX

Doing a presentation on what is new in Silverlight 3 at the MSDN Unleashed event in July:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032414266

in your in the greater seattle area it will be alot of fun and we get to learn some new Silverlight 3 goodness. Hope to see you there.

Twitter and Social Networking

I went to this exclusive dinner party at MIX tuesday night. at the table was a number of luminaries from Mark Brown (CEO IdentityMine) to John Stockton (Author, Acentium, SD2IG). The conversation evolved around UX and eventually into Twitter... I have stayed away from that digital crack but after falling on the side of the converstation for twitter I have decided that if I believe what I was saying I needed to use twitter...

http://twitter.com/DavidJKelley

So that being said Twitter allows a user to kind of plug into the community. It can be a collaboriation tool and almost a collective intelligence sort of tool, so that when I have a question I can post it and it gets answered quickly. Its like a big instance chat room that is open all the time. The power of the group mind to solve problems is clearly where I want to go and this tool among others allows us to get closer to this nervana of one ness.

MIX 2009

MIX is coming up. If Microsoft does the normal thing I'm sure we will get a good look at what is next for Silverlight. Hope to see you all there?

http://2009.visitmix.com/

CodeMash and DevTeach

Hm... I'm thinking I need to get my outline finished today for DevTeach. I'm exicted about both of these conferences. DevTeach I'm doing 3 sessions as planned but I found out today that I'm also doing a session at CodeMash this year.

DevTeach is giving a bunch of cool stuff to attendee's and I'm planning on having lots of swag to give out too. Now also at Codemash I get todo the same thing. Codemash is in Ohio at this cool resort and I'm doing a presentation on Silverlight 2 Arctectural Best Practices which will probably include some great 'Anti-Patterns' with the ubber Silverlight app Crossfader. If you can come check it out. :)

http://www.codemash.org/

and of

http://www.devteach.com/

both awesome conferences. :)

Silverlight Tour

For those interested in a little training check out the Silverlight Tour:

http://silverlight-tour.com/

Silverlight 2.0 Double Click Support

Ok, ok, I'm not giving anything away so don't get too excited. Check back at some later date. Who knows maybe MIX??? That is like next week.

Anyway, recently, I was told that you can't double-click in Silverlight...

So to me this is a bit hard to respond too. Not because Silverlight doesn't support it, but because if it supports single click or, 'OnMouseDown' -- 'OnMouseUp' or anything similar, then we are good. Basic computer science 101 stuff, right? All you need to do is something like this example.

In my code I create a counter for counting ticks. Say like this in c#:

public long LastTicks = 0;

Then in my 'MouseLeftButtonDown' event I have an 'if' statement that basically checks to see if the number of ticks between the last two mouse clicks is less then some defined number like this:

if ((DateTime.Now.Ticks - LastTicks) < 2310000)
{
// double click
here...
}

...and then at the end of the method, we have a line that sets the LastTicks value like this:

LastTicks = DateTime.Now.Ticks;

Nice and simple. This gives us a good solid double-click that we can do with whatever we need. Now in this sample we are using ticks but we could use any date-comparision thing and use seconds, for example, and we would just have to calculate the differential we want to use. For me it was 23.1 million ticks which seemed to work good on my box :)

Now don't go sending me a billion emails on why we don’t use double clicks in web apps. I'm just saying that it can be done, and a number of people asked. I know very well that double-click is not a good plan generally in a web sort of paradigm.

Silverlight Related Videos

here is bills key note which on a side note besides talking about Silverlight also shows this cool surface application that Identitymine did, hot sexy UI...

http://video.msn.com/video.aspx/?mkt=en-us&fg=rss&vid=e75f8529-b835-4282-81dc-37e0fa9da251&from=im_default&wa=wsignin1.0

also here is a video of Dan Fernandez talking about Popfly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW-EXufLoJg&feature=related

Silverlight Firestarter

Come up to Microsoft and check out this free conference they are putting on. I'll be there. You be there too :)

November 29, 2007
Microsoft Redmond Campus
1 Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA
Building 33, Kodiak Room
** Please have a photo ID with you to register onsite and park

Check-in: 8:00 am
Event: 8:30 am – 5:00 pm

Register: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032359153&Culture=en-US

or by calling 1-877-673-8368 and referencing Event ID 1032359153

I found this off of Brad Adams blog.

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2007/11/07/silverlight-1-0-fire-starter.aspx