You can even view Rob’s Netherlands presentation on Microsoft Channel 9.

Rob Miles of the department has been presenting at Microsoft conferences over the last few weeks. He has given sessions on the .NET Micro Framework and Windows Phone development at DevDays 2010 in the Netherlands and TechDays 2010 in London. Last week he was due to travel to Portugal to present there, but the volcanic ash cloud stopped him in his tracks.
Not one to be beaten however, he covered his office wall with Portuguese flags and conference logos and did the entire presentation using a webcam, two laptops and an assortment of robots. By all accounts it was well received, some even said it was preferable to having him there!

You can find the presentation here. You can find out more about the presentation at Rob’s blog, here.

The “Instinctive Input” team show off their certificates. If you look really closely you will see that they are all individually signed by Bill Gates. Well done folks.

We didn’t win, but one of the two teams we sent down to compete in the UK Imagine Cup Finals came a creditable third place. Many congratulations to the “Instinctive Input” team who took there eye tracking system down to Reading, hardware demonstration and all, and managed to put on a great show by all accounts. 

Congratulations to the Outcry team as well, who also got a finalist place. I’m really pleased that Hull managed to get two teams into the UK finals for the Software Development Challenge, this must make Hull the most successful entrant in the UK competition.

The teams had a great time down at Microsoft UK Headquarters. They saw demos of the latest technology and presentations from UK Game Development houses. Great stuff. I’ll have some more pictures and team details next week.

For Hull the Imagine Cup story is not quite over though. Christophe and Daniel found out earlier this week that they have made it through to the next round of the Game Development competition.

Micro-Mart, a weekly UK magazine about computing has a really good item about XNA and Indie game development in it this week. It starts at page 92. Well worth a read (as is the whole magazine actually). Rob Miles of the department makes some points about getting started in game development.

Two students from the department on our MEng Game Development programme now have their first game in the Apple App. Store, where it is proving popular and even making them some money. They started developing the game at the start of their final year of the course. It is based on an old favourite which has been customised for the iPhone platform and given a network dimension as players everywhere can upload their top scores and compete for worldwide bragging rights. The game has gained the pair some fame, they even got to make an appearance on BBC Look North.

If you want to have a go, search the App. Store for Aogi.

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.