Orta and title slide. Nice hat.

Orta (or Ben Maslen) is graduate from our department who is into iPhone development and other cool stuff. Our student computing society, Hull Com. Soc.  invited him up to Hull to give a talk about what he has been up to.

Very good presentation. Nice to hear some of the things that we go on about during the course coming back at us from an ex-student. Orta made the point that when you start doing something like this that you must actively engage with the developer community, asking questions and helping others. Just writing a game and putting it out there is one thing, but you also have to work at “being out there” to promote both yourself and the things that you have done. 

From what he showed us, he seems to be doing pretty well at it.

We had a really big Open Day today, perhaps one of our largest.

Great fun though. Two very good audiences for my talk, thanks for coming along folks and I hope you found the day worth the trip.

There was even a jazz band in Staff House who were sounding pretty good when I walked past.

If you want a free copy of our C# text book (the same one we teach our students from) you can download it in PDF form from:

http://www.csharpcourse.com

To compile and run your C# programs you will need a development environment. This is where you write the code and run it. You can get free versions of the Microsoft Visual Studio tool from:

http://www.microsoft.com/express/

If you want to write C# programs you just go for the C# version of Visual Studio. It takes a while to download, but it is worth waiting for…

If you want to write games you can then add the XNA framework which provides a set of resources for both 2D and 3D games. The framework is currently at version 3.1. You add this to your installation of Visual Studio and you can get the framework from:

http://creators.xna.com/en-US/downloads

Rob Miles has written a Microsoft Press book which teaches programming using XNA games. You can obtain a free PDF download of this from the Microsoft Faculty Site here:

http://www.facultyresourcecenter.com/curriculum/pfv.aspx?ID=8119

There is no need to actually sign up for faculty resource membership, you can skip that step.

One final note though, a bit of practice is a good idea, but do remember that it is your current studies that will get you to your university. Don’t get so taken away with the programming that you forget to turn up for your exams…

Phil, Andrew, Andy and James at Microsoft via Hull

Rob Miles from the department is a Microsoft MVP and in February he found himself in Seattle taking part in the MVP summit, where he met up with some of the Microsoft product team behind the new Windows Phone. He also met up with a bunch of ex Hull students who now work for the company as developers. They all had lunch on the Redmond campus in the new “Microsoft Commons”. Rob reports that the burgers were very good.

This is the new Where Would You Think design for the T shirt that we will be giving out in our first Open Day next week. If you are coming to Hull make sure you get one.

If you are wondering about the significance of the design on the front of the shirts, you can find out more here.

Andy Sithers from Microsoft came to see us today. We  all went for a meal in Staff House, had a quick meeting with the Imagine Cup teams to discuss their entries (looking good people) and then he gave a presentation as part of the Inspiration Tour. Great fun. 

Earlier this week a bunch of our students went off on a road trip to visit some game companies, including Black Rock and CodeMasters. 

These are students on our game development courses, and it will be interesting for them because they will be meeting up with ex-Hull students who now work in the game development business.

Yes. these guys are programmers. How  did you guess?

Into the fray

Peter Robinson uses a laser to lay down the law

Rob Miles has been recording XNA screencasts for the last six months or so for Thirteen1 magazine. The aim is to give you a gentle introduction to programming, using XNA games as the basis of the teaching.

If you want to view the screencasts, and download the practical sessions that go with them, you can find them on his VerySillyGames site:

http://verysillygames.com/Screencasts

In the meantime, if you want to take part in the competition, do your bit for charity and cost Microsoft some money (and who doesn’t) you can still sign up for the other competitions at the UK Imagine Cup web site. Microsoft have pledged a pound to charity for everyone who gets involved.