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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.

So, something that has been bugging me a lot lately is the fact that there are too many IM protocols to cater for, and too many IM networks to integrate if you want to cater for everybody. So the question is actually: is there a unified chat protocol that should be used to connect IM services to one another? As far as anyone can tell, the answer is probably a resounding "no", but I personally beg to differ.

First off, if you take a brief look at a single popular IM client that doesnt rely on a single protocol you can see where the headache with the multiple integration comes in. Take Digsby as a simple example, it boasts access to many social networks, many IM protocols, and email integration for all of your email accounts. Great right? The major issue is this requires a login for each account separately, and as part of this means that all of your accounts passwords and logins are in a single place. Not ideal.

So, near the end of last year I made a game, and put it up on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, Galactic Jump. As of today I have a cumulative total of 670 downloads for it, and for all my apps in total I have 760 downloads, not an amazing achievement, but I am learning as I go along.

So, as a start for 2012 I am going to do some serious marketting for Galactic Jump, as well as release an updated version using my new XNA based framework RapidXNA which will allow me to release a Windows and Xbox 360 version using the exact same code, and to allow for more diverse game play. There are also several features I will be adding to the game when I do this update, hopefully for the better.

A fairly standard way to store data in a structured format is to use XML, and in this short tutorial we will cover the loading of data from XML files easily. This short tutorial works as is on Windows Phone 7.5.

First off, add your XML document into your project in Visual Studio, and in its properties set Build Action to “Content”. This ensures that the XML file will be copied into the *.xap to be deployed onto the device when you are done. The XML file for this tutorial looks like this:

Source Image
Ok, so beginning with the source image we had two vectors in 2D space, lets call them R for the ray's position, and D for the ray's direction. The simplest and least efficient way to find the first point of intersection would be to increase the magnitude of the D vector by 1-unit (starting from D being a unit vector) until you hit something. The time costs for this are insane when you start working with larger areas though, the math however is fairly simple.