Plip's Weblog

NxtGenUG Silverlight Manic Miner

2008-08-03T20:42:14Z

http://www.nxtgenug.net/manicminer

NxtGenUG Co-Founder Richard Costall & Member Pete McGann are pleased to announce their “Silverlight” Manic Miner game Beta is now live on the NxtGenUG site. Manic Miner was originally written by Matthew Smith, under games company Bug-Byte in 1983. The game was a landmark title in the history of gaming.

The original classic features 20 caverns to negotiate, and Pete and Rich had lovingly created 9 of these so far, with more to follow shortly.

Silverlight Manic Miner shares a custom built ‘time based’ engine with an XNA version of the game. A library of C# files is shared between the two systems. The Silverlight edition is also integrated into the NxtGenuG site, through Application services, and registered visitors can have their high scores recorded and shown in a leader board which refreshes every 60 seconds.

Pete and Rich will be telling their story at NxtGenUG Coventry on August 11^th 2008

Silverlight, XNA and Gaming
Matthew Smith did it in 6 weeks in the early 80's, now over 20 years later Pete McGann and Richard Costall have built Manic Miner in .NET, with an engine which works for Silverlight and also XNA. In this session Pete and Rich, talk about the .NET engine, implementations and issues on the two platforms - before Pete steps up to take the ultimate gaming challenge...

http://www.nxtgenug.net/ViewEvent.aspx?EventID=136

Manchester Girl Geek Dinners

2008-07-21T18:34:39Z

Hey !

Just to let you know that on Friday 25th July there's another Manchester Girl Geek Dinner!

http://www.manchestergirlgeekdinners.co.uk/email/registration.php

Woo!

Plip.

Opera Dragonfly

2008-05-06T17:35:53Z

Opera Dragonfly is Opera's all-new set of developer tools, designed to give developers a lightweight-but-powerful application that provides effective mechanisms for web standards debugging and problem solving without slowing down the browser, and fits in nicely with the development workflow. The current feature set is as follows:

JavaScript debugger

DOM inspector

CSS inspector

Command Line to allow commands to be inputed

Error Console that outputs validation errors and warnings exhibited by the CSS and JavaScript connected with the page

Proxy to allow debugging directly on mobile devices

The current release version is an alpha, so it is currently a little rough round the edges; also we decided to implement all the most critical features first, and go from there - we have big plans afoot for our developer tools and you can expect to see a lot of fantastic additions in coming months.

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/introduction-to-opera-dragonfly/

Techbash - Pennsylvania (not Transylvania I'm afraid - so no blood sucking Java Developers)

2008-04-21T22:38:15Z

Since its inception in 2005, TECHbash has evolved into the premier technology conference in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Join an estimated 300 Developers, IT Professionals, CIO’s and Industry Experts from Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and host-state, Pennsylvania. This one day event brings together a broad spectrum of Technology Professionals to network, knowledge share and discuss existing technology solutions to business challenges, as well as preview prerelease products on the bleeding edge.

This year, we expanded to three tracks offering more presentations and providing you with more content choices representing a greater breadth of Industry insight. We will open the event with a keynote presentation from the unstoppable juggernaut, Joe Stagner, Program Manager for Microsoft’s Web Tools and Platform Division.Attendees will have the opportunity to:

Enhance technical knowledge with comprehensive and relevant educational content
Build experience on current and soon-to-be released technologies and products
Engage with sponsors, presenters, and other technology professionals
Learn how to get involved with .NET Valley, Northeastern Pennsylvania’s Technology User Group
Leave with software and other swag

For more information and to register for the event, visit the TECHbash website at techbash.com

Technorati Tags: Community News

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper UK - November 22nd 2008

2008-04-21T15:21:11Z

Get the date in your calendars guys and gals - the good ship DDD is coming back and this time it's bigger and better :)

The UK Developer community Rocks

2008-04-15T17:21:50Z

Video: UK Developer Community

DDD Ireland - 3rd May - Galway

2008-04-15T16:28:42Z

Developer Event? Ah go on, go on, go on.

Check it out at www.DDDIreland.com

Cheers,

Phil.

Disconnect?

2008-04-12T20:07:01Z

Short of yanking cables from walls I'd be hard pressed to do so ...

Does anyone truly disconnect anymore?

Developer Event - Oh Feck, I'd better write my session

2008-04-09T19:52:53Z

I'm speaking over in Galway on the west coast of Ireland on the 3rd of may for www.dddireland.com

There's a trailer video you can watch here for my session: -

http://gamtug.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3E6F2F13756DBDAB!994.entry

I'M SORRY.

Ta,

Phil.

Technorati Tags: Community News

Case sensitive usernames?

2008-03-16T22:40:22Z

Tonight I tried to login to my airline account (www.flyvlm.com) only to discover my username no longer seemed to be there.... or so I thought.

I was typing in philwinstanley, turns out, it's actually PhilWinstanley.

*grumble*

Phil.

Conversations you don't expect to have with your Mother. #234

2008-03-16T17:55:56Z

Me: "How's your laptop now after I put Vista on for you?"

Mother: "Well, I tried to virtualise Windows XP on top of it using that Virtual PC thingy but it didn't work right, I couldn't get the Shared drives working so I deleted it and am just on Vista now."

Anyone want to swap a completely mad Mother who understand Virtualization and Ubuntu for a vaguely normal one who knits jumpers and waters plants?

Wanted - WPF Developer/Designer (Remote or Local)

2008-03-14T16:08:37Z

A client of mine is in urgent need for a WPF developer/designer.

We're not afraid to work with people in other countries but you must have a great English skills (native speaker) and be hot with WPF, design skills would put you well ahead of the field.

Based in the North West of England my client is a startup which has won a major piece of business from a big blue chip client.

If you might be interested in some work for a major development with some big brand names you can place onto your Résumé then please do get in touch. this is a revolutionary product which we believe will change the way business' use their web sites; in fact, the product we're building is so cool it thinks rounded corners are cliché

Drop me an e-mail to: phil@secretvolcanolair.co.uk or call me on +44 7753 747 991 (Remember, I'm in the UK - so don't call me when I should be asleep!) if you're interested (more information will be provided during discussions).

Thanks,

Phil.

Technorati Tags: WPF, Designer, Developer, Job

Microsoft UK Launch Event in Birmingham

2008-03-10T22:26:42Z

Wednesday March 19th 2008 is of course the UK 2008 Launch Event.

You can help be part of this 'great' occasion by going to http://www.nxtgenug.net/2008launch/swagfortunes.aspx and answering eight short questions.

Your answers will go towards making up the choices which the teams have to guess during a "swaggily fortunes" gameshow.

So go on, fill in the quiz!

Cheers,

Phil.

Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Project

2008-03-09T21:49:42Z

Just a quick post to say it looks like the WDP for VS.NET 2008 was shipped this week whilst I was at MIX, go grab it here: -

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0aa30ae8-c73b-4bdd-bb1b-fe697256c459&DisplayLang=en

Cheers,

Phil.

Web Site - Closed Sundays

2008-03-09T12:45:23Z

Utterly nuts, a database lookup which only works during the week.

This is a service here in the UK which allows you to look up the details of registered companies: -

The fact they even bother to mention that they're interested in feedback around it's availiability is surely message enough it should be 24/7!