Learning and more learning

Last week the Windows Phone team hosted a series of Jump Start courses, which I "attended" for the most part. Unfortunately, my children were accommodating during the parts that I knew, but not the parts that I wanted most to see, but that's what reruns are for, right? It was a good overview of what the platform could do and how to do some interesting introductory things in both Silverlight and XNA. Alas, I did not win a T-shirt nor the private jet that they gave away.

I also "attended" the unboxing of a Windows Phone 7 by Tim Heuer. It may sound a bit lame, watching a guy open a package and play with the device, but it certainly makes things more real when you see a live device in someone's hands, being loaded fresh with apps and working. It was a decent group of people also watching, chatting on the side of the video. And, we learned not to stick a microSIM card into a SIM slot (but that it can be successfully removed).

This week I also moved from XNA experimentation to learning more Silverlight. Well, I haven't gotten to the Silverlight per se, but have started writing some background code (for Yet Another Twitter App) that will support the data-driven aspects of Silverlight. If you're so inclined, you can watch the Back|Start|Search twitter account for lots of noisy tweets while testing the app over the next while. After that, we might actually start using that account to tweet things of import!