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Book review: Windows Phone 8 Game Development

January 4, 2014 Leave a comment

“Sir, I want to be a game developer, what do I do?” is a question I got asked a lot during classes. The honest answer I usually give is :”work hard, keep trying and never stop trying”. I’ll keep on answering this, but I might also recommend a new book that has recently arrived titled “Windows Phone 8 Game Development – A practical guide to creating games for the Windows Phone 8 platform” by Marcin Jamro (Packt Publishing).
Remember the big bad-ass books by Andre Lamothe on (3D) Game programming, where many aspects of game programming were discussed? This new book has the same approach: more is better, plain simple.

A first glance at the index will immediately show the author is trying to describe all aspects of game development, not only the game (engine) coding itself, including social interaction, webservices, publishing, etc. What especially triggered my attention was chapter 3 titled “Mvvm design pattern”, a pretty ballsy approach because up until now I haven’t seen a single book on game development where this pattern is even just briefly mentioned.
Throughout the hefty 394 pages, the author will show how to (re)create a full-blown 3D space , asteroid-like shooter from the ground up. This is both good and bad news: bad because it means most chapters will depend on code of the previous ones, good because it shows how interdependent a lot of aspects are when developing a game. Many books who use this approach (i.e. build an application from start to end) sometimes fails because a) some important code-parts are missing or b) the code is to complex: the reader misses the keypoints the code wants to convey and thus loses time trying to get the code to work AND understand.
I haven’t made the game itself so I can’t vouch for the fact that a workable game can be made following this text but the code itself in the text is well-documented and clear.
A nice addition is the fact that a hybrid approach is used: managed code to harbour the menu/UI-related stuff, and a native part for the game itself. The game itself is written using DirectX, whereas the main game menus are in plain XAML (hence the MVVM approach mentioned earlier).

The text itself is very detailed, every step is explained, but sometimes a bit redundant: the author even explains how to place controls from the toolbox in your designer and how to debug using locals, autos, etc. A tad overkill? On the other hand, this makes the book ideal for anyone new to c#/xaml programming. So it could actually be used as an fun, introductionary book for experienced non-C#-developers who never used Visual Studio.

And yes, a lot is tackled: even augmented reality (AR) is in it: GPS coordinates of other players nearby are used to show their actual location when watching through the camera of the phone.
So in overall: if you need a primer on 3D/3D game programming for Windows Phone 8, this book is a must-have!

Adding a search contract to the Windows 8 Calibre frontend

December 11, 2012 Leave a comment

In this post I will show how simple it is to add a search contract to a Windows 8 Store app. This contract allows the user to search within your application from anywhere in Windows 8 using the search charm. We will use my Calibre frontend app to show this. Check this video to see the raw action of what we are making.

What we are building: the search in action after querying for books with “brown” in the authorname.

This is the second post of my quest on writing a Windows 8 Store app for Calibre. The previous post can be found here. Read more of this post

Filed under C#, Windows 8 Tagged with c#, calibre, code, linq, win8, winrt, xaml

Writing a Calibre frontend for Windows8/WinRT using ‘SQLite for WinRT’

November 27, 2012 8 Comments

While developing a Windows Store frontend application for the Calibre ebookmanager, I’m hitting several bumps along the road. In this post I’ll explain some of the bumps and how I’ve tried to tackle them.

Basically they can be summarized as follows:

How to access a Sqlite database in a WinRT application
Circumvent file access limitation of SQLIte for WinRT
Load cover files of each book
Create incremental-loading Gridview using ISupportIncrementalLoading

Calibre is a great open source and free to use ebookmanager. It allows me to manage my ever-growing ebook-library and it supports lots of ebook-filetypes, including the ability to convert between the types.

My goal is to write a simple Windows Store application that acts as a frontend for the Calibre database. It will show my library in a visual appealing manner (aka TDPFAM, “The-design-principle-formerly-known-as-Metro”) and allow the user to rapidly query his database from anywhere in windows. At least that’s the idea. We’ll see where we end up (check here for a little video demonstrating the application I’m building).

Future follow ups on this project might be found here on the Calibre developer forum.

Early alpha of Calibre frontend, simply demonstration what can be done (check out the youtube movie). Note the layout that is based on one of the existing VS2012 WinRT project setup.

The original Calibre program

With this post I hope others get triggered to create their own Calibre frontend, because, knowing myself, I’ll get bored of the project pretty soon once I have to tackle the UI/UX stuff …which I don’t like.
Read more of this post

Filed under C#, Windows 8 Tagged with c#, calibre, code, linq, win8, winrt, xaml

A WP7 databound graph control

May 30, 2012 3 Comments

For a project we are working on, we needed a simple (and free) WP7 graph usercontrol. The data which the usercontrol visualizes needs to be databound and each time new data arrives, the graph should update itself on-the-fly .In the following tutorial we’ll show how to create such a control from scratch (make note that normally this should also work in Silverlight or WPF projects).

A demo-solution of this tutorial can be downloaded here.

Creating an Intellisense compatible enum-based Dependency Property

May 30, 2012 4 Comments

Actually, this post has a way too fancy title , because in fact I will merely show that enum-based dependency properties are IntelliSense compatible “out-of-the-box”. (by the way, if you know all about dependcy properties: simply read the line in bold and you’ll know all there is to know).

When creating a (WP7/SL/WPF) usercontrol, one often ends up creating one more dependency properties (DP). Most of the times you only want a discrete set of possible values that can be assigned to the DP. The logical choice then of course is to have an enum-based DP.

Now, for the Intellisense to work it is important that you define the enum type OUTSIDE the usercontrols class. For example, suppose we have define the following enum:

public enum GraphTypes {Default, Point, Line}

Now, all that remains is to add a DP that uses this enum (remember that you can use the ‘dependencyproperty’ snippet that comes with VS):

        public static readonly DependencyProperty GraphTypeProperty =
            DependencyProperty.Register("GraphType", typeof (GraphTypes), typeof (GraphControl), new PropertyMetadata(GraphTypes.Default));

        public GraphTypes GraphType
        {
            get { return (GraphTypes) GetValue(GraphTypeProperty); }
            set { SetValue(GraphTypeProperty, value); }
        }

Once you now add the usercontrol elsewhere in your xaml-code, IntelliSense will happily show what values can be assigned to the DP:

There we go. That’s all there was too it.

Next post I’ll show how to create a WP7 user control to plot graphs using data binding. Consider some of the code here a sneak preview.

Filed under C#, Silverlight/WPF, Tips_and_tricks, WP7 Tagged with c#, code, custom user control, dependencyproperty, enum, intellisense, silverlight, silverlight 4, tutorial, visual studio, wp7, wpf, xaml

7 WP7 dev tools you might not know but will want to have

December 13, 2011 10 Comments

There’s an incredible amount of guides, tools and utilities to be found on the Internet (or should I say ‘tha cloud’?) for Windows Phone 7 developers. Compiled in this article are some of the tools I’ve come across on my searches which I now use frequently but didn’t know the existence of beforehand. Read on to change you WP7 development life. Read more of this post

Filed under C#, Tips_and_tricks, WP7 Tagged with c#, code, helper class, nuget, visual studio, wp7, xaml

Learning to cook with WP 7.5 data (a book review)

December 8, 2011 3 Comments

Recently I received a review copy of the “Windows Phone 7.5 Data Cookbook” by Ramesh Thalli from Packt Publishing (ISBN 978-1-84969-122-2). This book, divided in 8 chapters, shows how simple it is to write data-driven programs WP7 applications.

What follows is an extensive review of this book.
Read more of this post

Filed under review, WP7 Tagged with c#, code, data binding, ebook, twitter, wp7, wp7 app remote url caching webclient, xaml

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