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I’ve compiled a short video of Shawn Hargreaves’ XNA effect demos from his session at Mix (originally shown at GDC). Enjoy!
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You seen the demos, and now you have an idea for the money making application or game on Windows Phone 7 Series. Seeing as this is a new marketplace, if you can use your existing mobile application development experience to build that compelling app and get it published as soon as the new marketplace goes live you could be in for a winner and make wad of cash in the next mobile device wave – Windows Phone 7 Series. The trick is to get up to speed quickly. Well luckily for your there is plenty of...
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One of the great opportunities in mobile is the delivery of context aware applications – applications that can determine stuff automatically when they are being used in order to give the end user a better, and maybe more accurate, experience. Location services is one of the biggies in context awareness. Windows Phone 7 Series has a powerful location API that abstracts you the developer from the range of location services you might otherwise try to use to determine the device location. For example...
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For me the best session at Mix 10 was Shawn Hargreave’s CL22 – High Performance 3D Games on Windows Phone 7 Series. Shawn is an XNA demi-god and to see what he can make the new Windows Phone do with XNA is inspiring. The session is packed with technical facts and figures you just don’t find anywhere else, and it really gives you an insight into the power and capability of the Windows Phone 7 Series. For example, did you know that at 800x480 Windows Phone has 25% more pixels to draw then the original...
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I’ve been working with UK XNA MVP Charles Humphrey on project ZuneRay. ZuneRay is a raycasting engine built by Charles’ for the Zune HD using XNA 3.1. With Windows Phone 7 Series in the pipeline we used the Zune HD as a target test platform with the intention of porting it to WP7S once the tools became available. ZuneRay uses a classic approach to delivering a 3D experience without requiring 3D support – at the time we didn’t know if 3D support would be in the Windows Phone 7 Series XNA version ...
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There are now several resources available to the budding Windows Phone 7 Series developer. There are two book previews available: The videos from Mix are also now available – for detailed insight into XNA game development you must watch Shawn Hargreaves session! Love it. Plus he demonstrates the six effect shaders in Windows Phone – something I’ve seen no detail on anyway else. Top stuff Shawn! And if you haven’t got your free dev tools preview yet (WTF?) get the Dev tools and the Designer...
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Announced: the Windows Phone Developer Tools Preview is available! Yahooooo! The preview includes: The Visual Studio 2010 IDE A project template system for starting Silverlight applications for Windows Phone Visual Designers for Silverlight for Windows Phone that enable the drag and drop creation of UI, and the auto-generation of appropriate XAML Project template system for XNA Framework game development for Windows Phone 7 Series The Windows Phone Emulator All appropriate wiring to enable deploying...
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Integrating Windows Phone built-in application functionality is easy to achieve using the functions in the Microsoft.Phone.Tasks framework. Most of these features are not enabled in the preview emulator, but its worth looking at the library to understand the model of accessing the device function and the range of functionality available. Basically, all these tasks raise user interface requiring the end user to complete the operation. Programmatically you can set up all the parameters of the task...
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Having XNA on Windows Phone 7 Series is just awesome. There is nothing like being able to run your game on a small shiny device to make you smile. Having the Windows Phone Developer Tools Preview I decided to explore just how hard it was to get some of my existing games going on Windows Phone 7 Series. The first obvious candidates to play with are the 2D and 3D tutorial projects available on creators.XNA.com . If you are completely new to XNA development I encourage you to work through both tutorials...
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To explore some of the functionality available in Windows Phone 7 Series I have built my uber-demo application. This application is based on the Windows Phone List Application template in the Windows Phone Developer Tools preview. The preview emulator doesn’t implement all the device funcationality I try to use, so some of the code is not tested – something to look forward to when I get my ‘grubby mits’ on a device! The application uses a simple Model View Model architecture. To specify a unique...
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Using XNA Games Studio 3.x you could build a game that would run across Windows, Xbox and Zune. Now, unless you travelled to America or lived there you were unlikely to have a Zune or Zune HD. But now with Windows Phone 7 Series we have the promise of a device far more available for our mobile gaming. With the release at Mix of the Windows Phone Developer Tools preview we now have XNA Games Studio 4.0 support in Visual Studio 2010 and the ability to build games for Windows, Xbox 360 and Windows Phone...
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‘ Speech technology on cell phones getting better..’ states the Silicon Valley’s Mercury News . Microsoft’s Tellme Mobile Speech group leading the way with automotive and mobile phone speech recognition technology.
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If you are chomping at the bit to learn about Windows Phone 7 Series development you’ll be pleased to know the full session abstracts are now published on the Mix site .