So I have been working on lots of Windows Phone 7 games and applications, and so far all of them I plan to sell, albeit cheaply like .99 cents or something around there, but I wanted to make a free one as well just to kind of give something to the community. So I decided to write a Tic-Tac-Toe game, but I wanted to spruce it up a bit so I put my Photoshop skills to work and I have come up with the following. This is a quick preview, the game is near completion actually I just need to start putting the bits and pieces together. If you are curious its play against the computer only right now, the AI is done using MiniMax with some tweaks to make it slightly dumb so you can can actually win a game or two and the computer seems very intelligent at decision making.
I’ll probably add multiple chalk colors and such to make it more fun, this game is obviously aimed at the younger crowd but adults can still have fun with it as well!
Take a look at one my other Windows Phone 7 Games I posted called Towers of Hanoi!
So after some hard thinking and business decisions I decided to go ahead and delay AgileDash SP and focus solely on Windows Phone 7 Application development. I am going to release about 6 applications for Windows Phone 7, one of them being completely free with Source Code available and even a video cast showing how it was all done. I think this is a huge decision and a pretty big change in direction with where Elucidsoft is going, but I think it opens up new opportunities as well. I definitely and absolutely plan to finish AgileDash SP, after the launch in October of Windows Phone 7 I will begin focusing again on AgileDash SP and getting it out the door.
I seriously believe Windows Phone 7 will be an important and huge platform, I also believe it will overtake Android eventually simply due to the rich developer toolset that Microsoft has to offer the apps for Windows Phone 7 will be higher quality, richer, and just typically more functional. Stay tuned for some more info on the apps I am going to release!
Last week I posted a video about a bug I was seeing involving the orientation of the emulator in the Windows PHone 7 Beta tools. Well this has been officially confirmed as a bug that Microsoft is currently looking into, and also confirmed that this issue does not appear to happen on an actual device. This is good news!
Here is the video of the orientation bug I was seeing with on my Hanoi App:
And here is the response from a Microsoft employee I got on the forums staying he was able to reproduce the problem and is looking into it.
So I have been developing a couple Windows Phone 7 Applications in Silverlight in anticipation for the October release of the phone, below is a preview of the first game I have written that is a Towers of Hanoi game. It was relatively easy to do, only took me total of 2 weeks development time and that was with 2 full time clients at the same time. I could have easily pulled this off in 3-4 days time, which just goes to show you the sheer amount of power that Silverlight is offering up here on this platform!
So what do you think? I am going to slowly add features to it overtime but this is the final version of this game. I have 3 other applications that I am working on for Windows Phone 7 with the goal of release 4 fully fledged apps by October. Not all of them are games, but most of them will end up probably being games for the time being.
Update: I forgot to mention that I borrowed a bunch of concepts for this game from one of my favorite iPhone Towers of Hanoi games by NimbleBit. If you have an iPhone I seriously recommend getting that version as its awesome!
If you are doing Windows Phone 7 development and have the Blend Add-in for Windows Phone 7 Preview 2, Blend SDK for Windows Phone 7 Preview 2 and Windows Phone 7 Tools SDK installed, and are trying to use Expression Blend 4 RTM it will not work. When you open Expression Blend 4 it will throw an error saying it can not load the extension, and if you view the results tab it will show the following error:
Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.Expression.Framework, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35′ or one of its dependencies.
I tried everything to get this to work, but in the end I was forced to uninstall the RTM version of Expression Blend 4 and install the Expression Blend 4 RC version instead and it works like a charm? This seems odd, and it also seems pretty messed up, I think Microsoft should make this issue very clear on their Windows Phone 7 Developer site otherwise it is extremely misleading, especially since the only version of Expression Blend 4 available through MSDN is the RTM version!
Round 2 with the UI for AgileDash, and I am happy with how it looks now, next up is the integration with SharePoint 2007 which should be interesting. I still plan on using SPServices, but I could also write my own WCF service to act as a proxy to the SP Object Model, one is server side processing being relayed via Web Services, the other is Client Side Processing being relayed entirely client side. Decisions, decisions…
AgileDash, our flagship product which is an Agile project management tool which we be capable of running in multiple platforms. The first platform AgileDash will be available on is Microsoft SharePoint, which we are naming AgileDash SP. AgileDash SP was originally planned to be released for the new and powerful Microsoft SharePoint 2010 platform. However, as much as I want to develop against SharePoint 2010, most people and potential customers are still using 2007 and they will be for the near future. There are several reasons for this, the main reason is that SharePoint 2010 is 64 bit only. This is a good thing since it gives 2010 the ability to be more powerful by being able to scale vertically as well as horizontally. This also comes with a price to pay that a lot of customers are running 32 bit hardware still, they have heavy investments in this hardware and it will take time for them to convert over.
Now with all of that said, this was not a light decision on our part. SharePoint 2010 offered a rich client API for us to develop against with Silverlight and jQuery. SharePoint 2007 however does not offer this, and its extremely difficult to develop against when it comes to client side applications, in particular rich interface applications such as Silverlight. I ran across something that changed my decision drastically, Marc D Anderson has been working on a jQuery framework called SPServices that acts as a proxy to the SharePoint 2007 web services that lets you easily and naturally program against. He is actively developing this framework and it supports a large degree of functionality. I plan on working closely with Marc to develop and get this framework working in Silverlight.
I plan to start testing several scenarios in Silverlight calling out to the SPService jQuery library immediately. I will be posting about my findings on how this is working, what the performance is like, etc.
So I have tinkering with multiple types of UI to go with on AgileDashSP, and I thought it would be very cool if I could pull off a rich user interface while keeping functionality high, I would love to hear opinions if you think the sticky notes just complicate the UI. They can be scaled up and down as they are vector graphics, so I can make them smaller if needed, but you fit less information on them as they get smaller. I do plan on implementing a clever way to view the info at a quick glance if the text does get trimmed.
Well after lots of hardwork, mockups, drafts, discussions, and creative soul searching the new Elucidsoft site is up and running. There were a couple of goals for this site, it had to be fresh, incorporate the companies color of green all while maintaining simplicity. I believe we pulled it off beautifully! Let me know if you have any issues with styling or such with the site.
In addition I have setup a beta program that you can join for AgileDash SP, the plan is to release Beta 1 beginning of August to garner additional feedback and user perception. After which depending on feedback a release date will be scheduled. The beta form is utilizing a rather simple subscription service my hosting provider offers and it can be kind of slow at times. If it becomes to much of a nuisance I will switch it out for something a bit better!
So heres a tip, if you try to install SharePoint 2010 on Server 2008 R2 when you run the “Install software prerequisites” step it will fail. It took me a little why to realize why, I first tried to disable my firewall, and then UAC, etc. But nope, all you have to do is disable Internet Explorer Enhanced Security. That simple, just goto “Server Manager”, scroll down a little ways to Security and there is an icon on the right that says “Configure IE SEC”, and just turn it off. If this is going to be a production server, when you are done installing it is a good idea to turn this back on as to avoid any potential security issue.
Well thats simple right? To bad the errors you get from the prerequisite installer don’t say anything, and getting an error 13 showing in your logs which translates to “Bad Data” is not very helpful either.
