1. Developer, Developer, Developer! Manchester Windows Phone 7 Event

    This Thursday I attended the Windows Phone 7 DDD Event in Manchester at the Printworks Odeon Cinema, and it was well worth the trip! First sessions by Andy Wigley, Andrej Radinger and Maarten Struys were an overview of the Windows Phone 7 platform for those not famliar with it, and then a session about the developer tools and how to use blend to create the animations - something I’d forgotton about and will be taking advantage of in the final version of ZuneCardr. There were sessions by Andy Wigley on Silverlight Application development and Tombstoning in Windows Phone 7 again which were useful to refine some behaviour in ZuneCardr and to some extent GameCardr including restoring state information and making sure the experience for the application user is a good as possible.

    Also there was a chance to deploy Windows Phone 7 applications to a real device in a “XAPathon” thanks to Mike Ormond from Microsoft, which I tested GameCardr and ZuneCardr with, I also tested my tutorials and these worked great - especially the flip clock and analogue clocks which looked great, apps like Doodle Pad and Task List worked well too!

    There was also sessions from Rob Miles on XNA Games including some welcome references to the Zune HD platform and some praise for the accelerometer integration with the old XNA 3.1 and a request to add Zune HD compatibility to XNA 4.0, plus another on Marketplace integration.

    We were then shown a Visual Search application using the Cortexica API which looked great, and although not in-keeping with the Metro style, had it’s own look and feel! Then there was a session on making apps that work offline, in which GameCardr has been built, although there were couple of issues with how this works which will be added to the final release.

    A great event with some great speakers and a valuable opportunity to try my applications on a real device, where others also took this opportunity and I hope they found the chance as valuable as I did. Also got the chance to meet a few of the people from Twitter I follow and some new people too, sorry if I didn’t get the chance to see anyone else there in person, look forward the the chance to attend a Windows Phone 7 event in the future, by then devices will be available and I’ll also own one then too!