Knowledge Matters

Phil Wheat's Blog on all manner of items.

Archive for category Software/Tech

Windows Mobile 6.5 Dev information

Jun 8

Posted by PhilWheat in Software/Tech | No Comments

The Windows Mobile 6.5 dev kit is now out, if you’re interested in seeing what’s new and trying it out, you can scoot over to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=20686a1d-97a8-4f80-bc6a-ae010e085a6e and pull it down to test.

And if you’re like me and want to see a good demo of how to work with the devkit and all of the new capabilities of 6.5 – the Widget implementation walkthrough on the Windows Mobile Team blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2009/06/04/getting-started-with-widgets-on-windows-mobile-6-5.aspx) might just be for you.

PHP SDK for Windows Azure

Jun 2

Posted by PhilWheat in Architecture, Software/Tech | No Comments

I had a number of people ask me about PHP and Windows Azure at this past weekend’s Startup Weekend.  To spread out the info a bit more, I wanted to point out that the PHP SDK is now up on CodePlex – http://phpazure.codeplex.com/.  There’s a lot of info there on PHP and how it fits in with Windows Azure.

GameCamps coming to Austin June-Aug.

Apr 17

Posted by PhilWheat in Software/Tech | No Comments

With me living in Austin, I get to hear (and talk) about game development a lot.  If you don’t know, Austin is the MMORPG development capital of the world.  (To go along with the Live Music Capital thing.)  Well, there are game design graduate degrees, and college courses in development focused on games, but the local Austin Community College is letting developers get started even earlier by offering Game Camp this summer for Middle and High School students. 

These camps will run weekly between June 1 and August 14th here in Austin.  The list of guest speakers is quite impressive, and there’s a lot to learn.  So if you’re interested, check it out at www.gamecamp.org.

Note this is an overview type camp – you’ll get an introduction to all the different parts.  The industry as a whole, design fundamentals, Art and Design for games, programming techniques, career overviews, and a good look at what it takes to break into the industry.

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Exchange 2010 Beta up

Apr 15

Posted by PhilWheat in Software/Tech | No Comments

I’d missed this yesterday, but it appears that those looking to see what the next wave of Exchange looks like have to wait no longer. The first beta of Exchange 2010 has arrive and can be downloaded at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1898ed2c-2f88-48ac-824e-d3d20fad77d7

(Note 64 Bit only, but it WILL install on Vista with SP1 if you want to eval functionality.)

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Design your Dream PC

Apr 10

Posted by PhilWheat in Software/Tech | No Comments

us has introduced a new challenge – tell them what you want in a PC and they’ll look at the entries and build the winning design!. http://www.wepc.com/

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More “How Do I?” sessions going up

Apr 9

Posted by PhilWheat in Software/Tech | No Comments

If you haven’t seen the series yet, there are some great video tutorials (with code) going up at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/dd439432.aspx

As I start my upcoming “Coding outside the Box” series, I’ll be pointing to some of these for greater depth on the steps of my project.

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Nonstandard interfaces

Apr 2

Posted by PhilWheat in Life in General, Software/Tech | No Comments

Just as a note, recently I’ve been talking to a lot of people about nonstandard interfaces.  For the next bit I’m willing to test out one of the current “nonstandard interfaces” available to us right now by dictating my blog posts using the native Windows 7 voice interface.  I’ll be using the keyboard as little as possible during this test to determine just how far we’ve come with voice recognition.  I doubt I’ll ever abandon the keyboard completely as that was my first interface to computers.  But with this experiment I’ll be testing voice recognition in a variety of environments and tasks to determine if I can extend my toolbox for interacting with my systems.  With two blog posts dictated already using voice recognition, so for I’m very pleased with how it’s going.  The fact that seven is almost always spelled out and I have to correct it to a number is my biggest gripe speaks well for where we are.

I imagine the true test will be dictating in my car.  That’s a notoriously noisy environment as my built in voice recognition system for my hands three phone can attest.  But if it can work there even somewhat reasonably, then I’ll be able to take some of my input time (podcast listening) and turn it into input/output time (the reason I like to listen to those podcasts is that I get some great ideas, and having a better recording medium is always very helpful.)

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MVC release under OSI approved License!

Apr 1

Posted by PhilWheat in Architecture, Software/Tech | No Comments

No April Fool’s here – check out Scot Guthrie’s latest blog post.  MVC Framework from Microsoft has been released under the the OSI approved MS-PL license.  

You can read all about it at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/04/01/asp-net-mvc-1-0.aspx

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Mar 12

Posted by PhilWheat in Software/Tech | No Comments

I feel like Stanley S. (I can’t spell) on UHF screaming “Free toy inside! Free toy inside!” but Rob Vettor passed on the info and I had to post it.  If you’re interested in MVC and doing ASP.Net, you can find a great end-to-end tutorial on using it included in the new Wrox book on the subject.  It’s the Gu man, so there’s not much else I can say but point you to his blog and let you hear what he has to say. 

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http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/03/10/free-asp-net-mvc-ebook-tutorial.aspx

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Boku is now Kodu

Jan 15

Posted by PhilWheat in Software/Tech | No Comments

And if you’re scratching your head about that one, take a look at the new page up at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/ .

Announced as Boku at PDC, Kodu is a great project using a world simulator environment and a graphical language for writing programs to bring the concepts of processes and programming to very early ages.  To show just how radical the programming environment is, it can ONLY be used with a game controller – everything is keyed off of using the controller to manipulate the environment and write programs in it.

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