Blogs

Typically I don't have much to comment on what is happening in places online that I frequent, but more recently (over the last 3 months) it started to beg for me to take a better look at where I spend my time online. Typically I hang around in the more active places that deal with what I'm most interested in at the time, and while the places for the most part exactly what I am looking for content and support wise, they just don't cut it any more.

The problem is mostly that communities that aren't careful about how they allow others to perceive them alienate themselves from potential growth. This isn't something that only I think is wrong, but it is also causing many communities to slowly die out.

With reference to this thread on the AppHub forums I think the goals depicted there are reasonable goals for a starter kit of sorts, and should hopefully make some nice additions to RapidXNA

So, when I eventually get around to doing more dev on RapidXNA I will be aiming to do the following:

• Better pause support.
• Nick Gravelyn's EasyStorage for Win/Xbox, add functionality for WP7.
• Sprite classes which support animation out of the box
• UI controls (of a sort)
• Better certification dependance (ie. everything built in a way that it promotes the best practices for the certification and approval process)

Not particularly unrealistic goals, and for the most part I reckon it will be a step in the right direction.

That should hopefully give me a decent list of things to build into RapidXNA.

It is always a weird change going back from a working environment daily to actually going in to university daily. Mostly this is because the traffic increases exponentially as terms at all the universities begin at more or less the same time, but despite the traffic annoyances I am still getting back into my old routines from before I did work at Microsoft.

My work speed and pace has slowed down quite considerably since leaving my internship at Microsoft South Africa, but it is not necessarily a bad thing. I've been roped in to give Software Development workshops to Wits students on Microsoft technologies, and as part of this have a lab at my disposal. There are only 6 iMacs that came with the lab (1 which I can borrow and do what I want with for some decent portion of this year, which I will be using to learn iOS dev!) but myself and Shimane (the other head of the Software Dev interest group who I will be working with) will be getting another 5 iMacs/PCs to set up for the lab, and currently my biggest time-sink is learning my way around OSX, doing fresh installs on the iMacs that we have, and preparing the workshops I will be doing. Not too shabby.

Well, yesterday I slacked off rather badly and didnt post anything, though for some reason I decided I need to post something every Wednesday. I will make up for it next week when I catch up to life. In the mean time, if you have a Windows Phone 7 go try ZenAquaLunar out for free!

I was honestly thinking of leaving this for my wednesday post this week, but I was asked if I have done it yet, and have time, so I figured I might as well do it now. I will find something else to post/rant about for Wednesday.

So, despite the general consensus being that WP7 is not the market to make money in, I have decided to stick it out. And with some better insight into where I should spend my time from reading around, and some minor trial and error, I now know what I will need to do for 2012 to meet my personal goal of earning $1000 from a single game or app

So, to start off, just a bit about how my January has gone on the Marketplace. For January I have made $1.30 entirely from advertising, $0.02 of it from Galactic Jump (which I still want to make more consumer friendly), and the rest from a deice game "Yahtzee" which I put onto the marketplace for free, as far as I am concerned the revenue is not bad considering I am still not doing proper marketting for my apps and games, and the fact that until now I hadnt found which advertisement provider I wanted to stick to.

I've been catching up on some reading this last week or so, mostly because I've been looking for an article for what I'm trying to do at work that I read previously that has gone missing, and I came across something fairly new in my to-read list, and after reading it figured it is worth sharing

Reactive programming focusses on being able to define user interactions with your program in a simple manner. This was typically used in functional programming, but are usable in various other languages. It attempts to make it easier to define actual user interactions (like "after doing combo [X][Y][Up][Up][Down], perform action {Q}") without having to build large architechtures to facilitate parsing the input.

For many data reliant applications it becomes essential that you have easy access to your data, and as part of the easy access need to let your users create, edit, and delete content as they please. With Windows Phone 7.5 you can use SQL CE to create a database, and using SQLMetal easily build a class to construct your database in your application on first run.

Before you start, you need to note that there are limitation in the design of SQL Compact. For instance you cannot insert data into a table if the table has no primary key. Otherwise it will work like any other SQL DataContext you have used before. Keep this in mind while you create your initial *.sdf.

With web content inside applications becoming more commonplace, a nice addition to your application could be a page that pulls data from a site’s RSS or Atom feed for whatever purpose you feel fits your plans. This short tutorial works as is on Windows Phone 7.5.

First off, we need to start our request using a WebClient. We use OpenReadAsyc to get all the content of the page:

                webClient = new WebClient();
                webClient.OpenReadCompleted += new OpenReadCompletedEventHandler(webClient_OpenReadCompleted);
                webClient.OpenReadAsync(“http://realdev.co.za/rss”);

This tells our WebClient to attempt to get the RSS from RealDev.co.za, the URL given should point to the actual page that outputs XML.