If you are a .NET engineer and you are in need of porting some Windows Phone or Silverlight code over to the Android platform, you should consider taking a look at Mono for Android. At a reasonable price, Mono for Android allows you to use C# and the .NET Base Class Library to write native Android applications. Hooks can be added to call Java or C++ if you need to but most of your coding can be done in C# with Visual Studio. If you already have some existing code or a longer term need to share between platforms, this seems like a good way to go.
–Andy
|
||||||
|
The beta of Windows Phone 7.1 came out this week and from what I have seen so far, it appears to be a fairly significant release and should result in many new types of apps showing up in the marketplace. Critics may see many of the new features as Microsoft playing catch-up to the other mobile platforms, and maybe in some sense they are, but I see them as well worth the wait. .NET continues to be my platform of choice and I feel like we are getting a very solid foundation to build on with each release. After a quick review, here are some of the new features that jumped out at me … Multitasking “What? I can only do one thing at a time with Windows Phone?” Yes. Until now. I honestly didn’t miss this feature too much in my daily use of my phone. The back button design is a very natural way of getting in and getting one thing done and getting back to life as they say. Having background tasks running, however, will be handy. LINQ to SQL Yes! Local databases and queries, very nice. Combined Silverlight/XNA Apps Add low-level game graphics to your XAML apps or add XAML screens and menus to your XNA game. You no longer need to choose one or the other. System.Net.Sockets Until now, the http client class has been the only network interface available. TCP and UDP sockets can now be created for data connections. And many more features … here Looking forward to them. –Andyикони Unity 3D is a development environment that lets you create a graphic application and then package it up in such a way that it can be deployed on different platforms such as windows, mac, web, mobile or even to a game console. I had a chance to play around with it recently and I came up with the following web demo which is sort of a visual instrument.
Check it out …
 Find Unity 3D here … www.unity3d.com
Here’s an early preview of a WP7 app I’ve been playing around with … Check out the announcement here. Some cool new things to look at …
I went to a hands-on lab about WP7 yesterday put on by Microsoft here in indy and I walked away all excited about how easy it should be to put a phone app together now with all of the tools being so familiar. Visual Studio and XAML, very similar to WPF and Silverlight. Cool stuff. Here are some good WP7 resources posted by Dave Bost. If you find yourself managing a lot of different types of connections to a lot of different machines you might want to take a look at the Remote Desktop Manager by Devolutions. It does a great job of organizing your sessions into a tree and tab layout. Check it out. Have you ever downloaded a giant *.iso image file of a DVD and wanted to just use it without having to burn it to a disk first? Check out Virtual CloneDrive and you’ll be able to just right-click the .iso file, mount it, and it then works like a new drive letter on your system … and the sheep icon is classic! Clone, get it? LOL When you were a kid did you ever want to peek at your Christmas gifts before the big day? That’s how I feel about the gift that is VS2010 … I’ve been dying to try out the pre-releases that have been sitting under the tree for some time now but I’ve somehow managed to resist the temptation to peek. There has been such an overload of cool microsoft technologies launched over the past 2-3 years that I’ve just been reading and waiting for VS2010. Here’s a good overview of it in … The Making of Visual Studio 2010 Can’t wait for the sugar-plums on April 12th! Silverlight 3 is now available for download from MSDN. It seems pretty crazy that MS was able to add so many features so quickly, the last release was less than a year ago. I haven’t explored all the new features yet but the first thing I plan on looking at is the new Expression Blend 3 which has a tool called SketchFlow that lets you protoype and share mockups of programs easily. The bonus with this approach is that you can iterate designs quickly with higher level stakeholders without spending tons of time engineering code. |
About Andy
Links |
|||||
|
Copyright © 2012 Andy Weston's Blog - All Rights Reserved |
||||||
