Xnaml Component
Following Red Badger’s XPF here comes another Silverlight in XNA component to continue the promise of Bronzeglow: Xnaml Component. Valentin – its creator – asks for beta testers in the AppBuh forums, so head over to his contact form and, well, contact him.
A Petition And a Port
There is a petition open for signature to convince Microsoft to open the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace to all countries (or in which phones are available at least).
The other thing is a fund raiser to release ExEn: XNA for iPhone [Ed.: iOS?], Android and Silverlight under the Ms-PL and add Android support.
Article: WCF on the Windows Phone 7–The How to Guide
by Simon Jackson
Well at the behest of Michael B McLaughlin (@MikeBMCL on Twitter), here's a run down of what you need to know to get WCF working on the Windows Phone 7, both for Silverlight and XNA. This is just going to be a brief overview and the full detail will be included in the LeaderBoard sample for Silverlight and XNA coming soon.
Many thanks to @MikeBMCL pointing me to this post by Michael Cummings who details one approach to getting WCF working for XNA. It does work, but it’s a long way round. It did however point me in the right direction to solve the problem and now I’ve got WCF working the way I Like it. As in Working.
Bob Taco Ind back to WP7 loving
After having a rough day in his relationship with Windows Phone 7, Bob Taco Ind (Michael B. McLaughlin) is back in business, with two short tutorials related to programming for the upcoming device. First, he shows you how to pin your game to the start screen, followed by one option of properly exiting a Silverlight-based game on WP7.
Post Scriptum thoughts for my colleague Cpt. Boki after realizing I'm kinda stalking Michael's blog... Where did the MVP Watch thingy go?
Windows Phone 7 Tools Beta Including XNA 4
We must be getting near to the release of the highly anticipated Windows Phone 7 because Microsoft have just announced the Beta of the WP7 tools including XNA Version 4.
XNA Creators site kindly kept everyone informed here
http://creators.xna.com/en-US/news/xnags40beta
And if you want to get straight into the action go here http://creators.xna.com/en-US/launchcenter and hit the big download link.
Make sure to read the release notes as there's some fairly crucial changes in there if you've been using an older version.
Perhaps this might be a good time to start thinking of a tutorial/sample you can share with others using the new WP7 Beta.
http://www.sgtconker.com/2010/07/teaser-xna-tutorial-contest/
The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!
In case, like me, you've been living under a rock, there has been an update to the Windows Phone 7 CTP that now supports Visual Studio 2010 RTM.
The main blog post from the WP7 dev team is Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh! and gives a great basic overview. If you want to get straight to the bits, that link is Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP - April Refresh. You will want to pay attention to the Release Notes this release as there are breaking changes if you have any projects created in the first CTP. There is also an overview of what has changed on MSDN, What's New in Windows Phone 7 CTP Refresh.
If you followed my post about Ultimate support (Windows Phone 7 Installation User Errors With Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate RC), there are a couple of caveats to uninstalling the RC bits. You may run into more problems when trying to install the CTP Refresh so hopefully this will help eliminate some headache ahead of time.
- Do not uninstall individual pieces like XNA or heaven forbid Visual Studio 2010 Express. The installer keeps track of everything it puts on your system and will proceed to add it back if it is missing. In the case of no VS2010, as The_Zman found out the hard way and had to reinstall the Express RC separate.
- The CTP leaves two things that the refresh needs to be removed before it will install: Silverlight 4 SDK and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express Prerequisites x86 or x64 depending on your system.
- I had a link to the Silverlight 4 Tools that have now been refreshed to RTM. That link is actually no longer needed as VS2010 RTM installs them for you.
Hope this reiteration will save some of you the grief The_Zman or ElementCy ran into. Happy hax0rin!
Article: Windows Phone 7 Push Notifications
by Sgt. Conker
In this article I will explain how to use the Push Notification features of Windows Phone 7 using 2 very simple samples.
The push notification features of Windows Phone 7 enable you to push a message to a mobile device with 3 options.
- Tile notification – This lets you change the main application tile on the Start experience.
- Toast notification – This lets you popup a message on the device even if your application is not running.
- Raw notification – This lets you send raw data to the running application which you can receive via an event.
For this sample, we’re going to concentrate on Toast notification. While Tile notifications will be cool, we unfortunately can’t make use of them with the current build of the emulator.
As a teaser, here is the result we want.
HOWTO: Choose The Right Framework For Your Windows Phone Game
Michael Klucher posted a quick explanation of the different application models in the Silverlight and XNA Framework to help you deciding what framework to use for your Windows Phone game. Ends his post:
There’s no perfect “one size fits all” answer to help you make the choice for what is best for your game, so you’ll want to think about the tools you want to use, and the type of experience you want to enable when approaching developing your game.
Silver Sprite 3.0 Alpha 2
Bill "Silent Assasin" Reiss has brought word of an Alpha 2 build of SilverSprite 3.0. You can grab the source and start playing with it right away
http://silversprite.codeplex.com/
SilverSprite enables you to get your XNA game working inside Silverlight with minimal fuss. It's worth checking out and if you're interested in Windows Phone 7 development, then this is an ideal starting point.
Here's a recent blog post discussing the Alpha in a little more detail. Read More
It’s Official, XNA & WP7 are set to get it on!!
Finally, the moment you've all been waiting for.
Over the past few weeks I'm sure you've all heard about the "leak" of documentation that was supposedly showing the use of XNA and Silverlight for Windows Phone 7.
Well now, it's official!!
Windows Phone 7 WILL support XNA and not only that it will also support the use of Silverlight for Apps & Games.
Our favourite Mr Klucher posts his snippet http://klucher.com/blog/gaming-development-for-the-go/
And the The Special One finally prevents himself from imploding by spilling some beans here http://twitter.com/shawnhargreaves/status/10014398597
There's still very little details on what exactly will be available to us.
Will we have avatars? will he even have 3D or will it be the same mediocre support that we have for the Zune HD. Will it even matter? Will there be a marketplace for you to develop for ? All that should be revealed at MIX and beyond but for now, get writing some Windows Phone 7 games. You can bet a $ anything that works on Zune HD will require very little changes to work on WP7.
Silverlight is also very interesting, knocking up high quality applications will be a breeze.
Stay tuned for more details as they come in... Exciting times ahead.
[EDIT : Added link source] : http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/04/microsoft-talks-windows-phone-7-series-development-ahead-of-gdc/