Programming

My Tech Evangelist colleagues, Joe Raio and Brian Sherwin, have create a great set of video tutorials on how to create your own website using Azure. This is part of Microsoft’s Choose to Code campaign, which guides your middle and high school students through a series of online tutorials walking them through the process of creating and publishing their own website. If you are using Azure Passes, watch this video If you are using DreamSpark, start with this video Course Setup and Azure Activation Building your very first web page with HTML using Visual Studio Online! Let’s learn how to add some style to your page with CSS Make your website mobile friendly using Bootstrap Making your website interactive using JavaScript Learn how to use jQuery to send and receive data Still need Azure? Reach out to me to inquire about BizSpark

RESOURCES: You can find the source for this project on my GitHub. Power point slides Video Walkthrough Get this working on Windows Phone In part 2 of my tutorial, I showed you how you how to set up the initial project with prime[31]. Now that we have it built, I’m going to walk you through the code, as well as how it all works. Insert Let’s test this out by running the project from Visual Studi and inserting a new object into our leaderboard. Deploy the sample, connect to the Azure service, then insert a new username and score. ...

I’m still at Unite 2014 this week, so I thought I’d deliver a quick recap of the Unite 2014 keynote, courtesy of Jaime Rodriguez, of Microsoft. Here was my favorite talk of Unite as well: [Unite 2014 – IL2CPP: The next generation of scripting in Unity](Unite%202014 - IL2CPP: The next generation of scripting in Unity) Unite 2014 – WebGL Deployment in Unity 5 Opening stats: [David Helgason, CEO] 600k active montly game developers .. [compared to 120k users, 3 years ago] 54% of games use middleware [compared to 10% 4 years ago] 47% mobile developers use Unity [17% in 2009] 8.7B Unity mobile app installs [not all inclusive, that is people who opt-in to analytics] PC has strength [mobile devs targeting PCs as they get better] Industry: [David Helgason, CEO] ...

RESOURCES: You can find the source for this project on my GitHub. In part 1 of my tutorial, I showed you how you how to set up the initial project with prime[31]. Now that we have it built, I’m going to walk you through the code, as well as how it all works. Now that we have the project built, let’s open it up the metro folder, and launch the Prime31 Visual Studio solution. ...

My co-worker, and web dev ninja, Stacey Mulcahy (@bitchwhocodes) put together a great series of blog posts on how to use Spacebrew ( a web sockets solution built on Node that enables you to create interactive spaces with several clients ) with Unity3d and Arduino & Processing. This is the beginning / start of next week’s bit where she shows how to build your own DDR mat and hook it into Unity3d, Arduino, and Processing. ...

A few months back, I wrote a piece on a high level overview of Microsoft’s Web App Template. I’ve recently learned that it not only works on Windows 8, but is also applicable to Win Phone 8, with Universal support coming soon. So why would anyone ever wrap their site and turn it into an app? Well for one thing, it can quickly and easily net you 300+ 4+ star reviews on the store, and takes no more than an hour to create. ...

[iframe src=”http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/34969684″ width=”676″ height=”600″ frameborder=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″ scrolling=”no”]

You can download the app from the Windows 8 Store, for free. In my last post, I mentioned that I began using Microsoft’s new Web App Template, to quickly and easily create an app out of my website, while using very little code. Now that my app is finished, I wanted to walk you through the steps, so that you can do the same. In total, it only took me about 2 hours to have my app created from scratch, and in the store! ...

This post is part of 3 week series giving current and aspiring game devs the tools, resources, and advice they need to get started building for Windows. We also have a great video course on [game production basics](http://Game Production Basics) at Microsoft Virtual Academy. Visual Studio Community Edition visual-studio-logo You need an IDE, or Integrated Development Environment, to write code for your games. Visual Studio Community edition is FREE from Microsoft, and allows you to use a multitude of languages. ...

Update 3/29/16 With today’s announcements at //BUILD, some of this information will be out of date. I will make changes in the very near future. Updated, 9/24/15 TLDR: Middleware engines work great and support for Xbox one is continuing to grow within new tools each day. I have a more recent post with more information following Microsoft’s presence at GDC 2015. Here is the latest. For developers to focus on building for the UWP. Building UWP apps today is the best way to make sure apps will work on the Xbox when UWP is available on the Xbox. Similarly how different device families have specific APIs (GPIO, Hardware buttons, etc), Xbox will have a set of APIs that developer can use to extend experience to match the Xbox One, and those APIs will be used on top of the core UWP functionality that developers are building today. ...