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/
How to get your Windows Phone 7 Dev Device
Windows Phone 7 Device Requests: Well, not exactly how but how to increase your chances on being considered at all.
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.
XNA Game Studio and Windows Phone Emulator Compatibility
Michael Klucher puts some more details onto the sparse information in the CTP readme about XNA Game Studio and Windows Phone Emulator Compatibility, outlining the requirements to get the emulator running on Vista SP2 and the demands on the GPU.
Windows Phone Developer Tools and XNA Game Studio 4.0 Available Now
While we are waiting for the MIX10 coverage of the Sergeant here’s the Windows Phone Developer Tools + XNA Game Studio 4.0 Available Now! post by Michael Klucher. To add some more content to this post:
In the Windows Phone Developer Tools Preview you’ll find:
- Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone
- Windows Phone 7 Series Add-in for Visual Studio, for developers already working with Visual Studio 2010 RC1
- Windows Phone 7 Series emulator
- XNA Game Studio 4.0
More on XNA Game Studio 4.0 and Windows Phone Support
Says the Klucher through the tweets of The Shawn:
Demo [Harvest, developed by Luma Arcade] looks awesome, full 3D, animating characters. More will be shown at MIX next week.
The game loop on the phone is similar to existing platforms, but tweaked for power efficiency.
The phone graphics is an evolution of the existing immediate mode rendering API, 2D and 3D:
- New configurable effects: BasicEffect, SkinnedEffect, EnvironmentMapEffect, DualTextureEffect, AlphaTestEffect
- Custom programmable shaders are not supported on the phone
- Image scaler:
- lets you render to any size backbuffer, and have this automatically scaled to fill the screen
- lets the same game run on both 800x480 and 480x320 display sizes without special coding
- provides automatic rotation to support portrait, landscape left, and landscape right modes
- the image scaler is free: it uses dedicated hardware so does not consume any GPU
Portability: the ability to target three screens. Portability lets you target more sockets with a smaller time investment. Portability is not just about the same game running on different platforms, it is also valuable to share infrastructure, knowledge, etc.
Framework feature profiles:
- Reach: broad base of devices including phones
- HiDef: Windows and Xbox only
“Focus on being a game developer, not plumbing the underlying technology”
“Michael Klucher plugs forums.xna.com, says our MVP's are awesome and do a great job answering questions.”
“Michael Klucher gets applause!”
The will be more talk about the Marketplace and the Windows Phone emulator at the MIX next week.
XACT is part of the HiDef feature profile, so not on the phone: use SoundEffect (+ 4.0 enhancements) on the phone.
Ozymandias has an article about how to get in touch with Microsoft to get access to Xbox LIVE on the phone.
Update (2010-03-11 02:31 GMT): The Shawn has another blog post up, high-level-detailing some Windows Phone support related work done.