Recommendations on Resuming
Coming hot from the freshly-awarded MVP Michael B. McLaughlin, a set of no less than eight (8= 2*4 = 3+5 = 10-2) tips to improve the experience of users when they need to close and resume your XNA game on Windows Phone 7. The article is a must read for everyone who doesn't want to annoy their customers.
Go ahead and read it now.
Posting a Clingerman to Stay Relevant
Due to the lack of updates recently we’re going to do an XNA Notes inspired round up on this very Monday, and we also like to post a photo of the original author of the XNA Notes to shout yet another Vote for George!
With that out of the way here are the nominations for next Friday’s XNA Notes (in no particular order):
Jim “Still Not Evil” Perry shares an updated XNA 4.0 for Windows version of the Game State Manager sample.
Nick “MVP” Gravelyn breaks the word about a “solid way to handle trial [Ed.: not trail, as initially stated] mode on the Windows Phone 7” written by Dean Johnson.
There’s a new Ad SDK for XNA on Windows Phone 7 in town, seeking help for a very closed beta.
And last but not least, Jason Swearingen still participates in the #AltDevBlogADay, this time covering Spatial Partitioning. Part 1: Survey of spatial partitioning solutions.
A closing paragraph with the sole reason to have the text flow below the photo and bear no real content. The same can be said about this link to The ZBuffer. However, this The cake is a lie does have a meaning…
Whoa… long time no see
Sorry for the long absence 
Anyway, here's some news:
Miscellany Tips for Working With a WP7 Device for the First Time, by Michael B. McLaughlin
Compressed GPU data formats, by The Shawn
Viewing Windows Phone 7 Marketplace on the simulator, by David Amador
WP7 Performance educational content
The App Hub has just received some excellent new educational content on performance related subjects.
Add these powerful tools to your next game and take advantage of profiling, frames-per-second counting, and an on-screen customizable debug console, all in one handy package
If you’d like to take the performance utility out for a spin and learn about 3D drawing and performance in the process, try this 3D demo, already instrumented with the powerful performance utility.
Debug and tune your game with visual data using this heavily-optimized batched rendering sample that can be called from anywhere in your game to render lines, triangles, bounding boxes, frustums and spheres, all with tunable lifetimes.
Performance Considerations for WP7 Article
Get answers to Windows Phone 7 performance questions around content loading and memory management, as well as instructions on using the CLR Profiler to dig deep into allocations and garbage collection.
Best Practices for WP7 Games Article
If you’ve got aspirations of being on Windows Phone Marketplace, be sure to read this guide on bringing the best experiences to your potential customers. Learn the best practices around graphics, input, audio, and storage for games on Windows Phone 7.
Tombstoning for WP7 Games Article
Learn how to play best in the Windows Phone 7 environment – learn how to handle and recover from interruptions that require your game to save state, exit, and return later with state and content intact.
Bonus: Memory Madness 4-Point Multi-Touch Lab
Curious about Windows Phone 7’s four-point multitouch capability? Try it out and learn how to implement it yourself with this challenging memory game!
Original Source
Welcome to the App Hub
In a surprising turn of events, the XNA creators website goes down. Never to be the same again.
Microsoft have launched the App Hub, which is for both XNA Indie Games on the Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7.
An interesting twist in the tail is that if you already have a XNA Subscription, you are now a Windows Phone developer also.
You can submit to both areas with the same single account. How amazing is that?
Enough rambling, go check it out http://create.msdn.com/en-US/
XNA Tile Engine Base Solution for WP7
Gareth Williams has posted news of his Tile Engine solution for XNA which runs on Windows Phone 7.
And a handy list of all the features of the solution:
- Suitable for side-on and top-down games
- Good for platformers, RPGs, shooters, racers, adventures - anything that needs tiles!
- Works in landscape or portrait with one line change.
- Built on the Windows Phone 7 XNA Gamestate Management engine sample.
- Uses Nick Gravelyn's content pipeline extension for the "Tiled" editor.
- Simple but flexible camera class that clamps to the map boundaries.
- Draw the whole map at once, or one layer at a time for flexibility.
- Parallax scrolling simply by adding a couple of properties to a layer in Tiled.
- An overload to draw a layer as "shadows" by drawing offset+black+semi-transparent.
- Per-pixel colour-based collision detection on specified layers/tilesets.
There's a link to the sample project on his blog, please read the rest of this post along with trying out the sample.
Source
WP7, XNA and XAP Size
Yeah, whenever Michael B. McLaughlin says "quick post", you need to watch out.... In his latest quick post, Michael talks about the size of various content that gets packed into an XAP file, and gives some suggestion on how to shrink the size of your XAP file. The whole post is here, for your reading pleasure.
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.
Article: Scripting on the Xbox 360, Windows Phone, and Beyond!
by UberGeekGames
Scripting. It’s a recurring theme on the XNA forums: “Can I use Lua?” “Can I script on the Xbox 360?” “Scripting FTW! No, scripting FTL!”. Do a quick search for “scripting” on the XNA forums and you’ll find many threads with the preceding themes. There’s a lot of information about scripting, and it usually ends with “no, you can’t do scripting on the Xbox, and it’s probably not a good idea anyway”.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you what scripting is, a very useful type of scripting that I’ve been using more and more, and how you can make your own scripting system and use it effectively.
Article: Programming your first XNA 4.0 game for PC, Xbox 360 & Windows Phone 7: Pong
by Thomas "Mister Helmut" Altenburger
I’d like to introduce the XNA framework to you with this very simple and straightforward tutorial. We will see what XNA is and how its basic features works to continue with the programming of your first game, a simple Pong clone for Windows. At last, we’ll try to convert it to the Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7. This tutorial assumes that the readers have a basic C#/.Net understanding. I hope that it will help you to understand the basics of the framework and that it will motivate you to go further in. The article should be suitable to complete beginners in game programming.
About this tutorial: I wrote this tutorial back in the days of XNA 2.0 beta and used it as an introductory course I taught to master degree students. Since then, it evolved to support XNA 4.0 beta with added Window Phone 7 development.
English not being my native language, please forgive and/or report any English oddities.
This tutorial targets XNA 4.0 beta. It will be updated when the final version will be released. It uses some new features of XNA 4.0 so it will not run out-of-the-box on previous XNA version (mainly due to the usage of Viewport.Bounds and changed SpriteBatch.Draw arguments order).