Friday, September 17, 2010

I'm Still Here

Unlike Joaquin Phoenix's stunts regarding the film of the same name, this isn't a hoax -- I really am still here, even if I haven't been posting.

The final RTW (Release To Web? Release To World?) of the Developer Tools was released yesterday to much fanfare (at least, amongst the Windows Phone 7 developers). The uninstall of the Beta version and re-install of this final version went painlessly, unlike my previous experiences. I won't go into the features added/changed - they can be found on the main Windows Phone 7 site or on many of the main developers' blogs, all linked on the side.

The WP7 community is growing and very active, keeping my RSS feed very busy, and thus me busy reading about the latest tricks people have found and the latest projects people have been working on. There is so much good material coming out, it all feels like required reading, and thus take a not-insignificant amount of my time to keep up on. At one point I was over 300 posts behind in my reader... after a reading blitz over the last few nights, I'm now only a respectable 17 behind. All this reading and learning has definitely affected any progress in developing *my own* apps.

As for my progress... I finished reading Learning XNA 3.0 by Aaron Reed. I had a few issues with the writing style and some of the content, but overall it was a good way to learn XNA; it ramped up from the basics in 2d to some fancier tricks in 3d and interesting material on HLSL. I haven't put any of it to use yet, but from it I've learned nearly everything I need to implement my first game idea.

On the Silverlight front, I'm a little more behind. I've got three or four ideas that I want to put in place, but don't have the skill/talent for design nor the Silverlight know-how to implement it, if I did. My first app is going to be a GEDCOM viewer, figuring that a viewer (versus an editor) would be an easy first step, that I have lots of data available, and it's the kind of app that will give me experience with multiple views and will utilize lots of different Silverlight items, from columnal layouts to listboxes to the newer pivot/panorama devices for Windows Phone. The backend code is nearly complete - reading and parsing the data - but I now have to figure out the design portion (how I want it to look) and then the implementation of that (the Silverlight portion). Unfortunately, it's possible to learn Silverlight (a skill) but it might not be possible to learn the design (an art). I'll see how well I do in the next week or so.