Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

Browse by Tags

All Tags » Programming   (RSS)
Wednesday, August 13, 2008 6:10 AM

Tutorial: 2D Game Development in Silverlight

Now this looks interesting – a tutorial to create a game using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology . The article describes how to implement a game loop, render images and shapes, the handling of keyboard events, and how to do some simple collision detection.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, August 08, 2008 6:15 AM

Friday Misc Links – August 8 2008

Found a few good nuggets to share with people. Robots If you are in to robots or know someone who is I saw this announcement from the Microsoft Robotics team blog . The RoboChamps Amazed Challenge is over and the winners have been announced. However,
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, August 07, 2008 4:58 PM

The Language is NOT the Important Thing

Invariably when anyone posts about “the right” programming language to use in a first course a lot of discussion ensues. People are notoriously opinionated about this topic. I am not exempt from this and I admit that I have fallen into this trap in the
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Wednesday, August 06, 2008 11:27 AM

Teaching Casting

I love a good analogy. Actually I even like so-so analogies. But this one about casting variables from Rob Miles is a particularly good one I think. I can see saying “and now playing the role of an integer is 3.14159” What was that you are asking? Well
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, July 31, 2008 5:26 AM

Visual Declarative Designer

Last week the Microsoft Visual Studio Middle School Toy was announced and I wrote about it in my blog . Today I wanted to give people a taste of what one of the features – the Visual Declarative Designer - looks like. This one really deserves the “toy”
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, July 29, 2008 6:25 AM

Teaching Flowcharts – Have the Computer Draw One

Last week the Microsoft Visual Studio Middle School Toy was announced and I wrote about it in my blog . Today I wanted to give people a taste of what one of the features – the Visual Programming Flow Chart - looks like. It’s really pretty simple to use.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 4 Comments
Friday, July 25, 2008 5:43 AM

Microsoft Visual Studio Middle School Power Toy 1.0

The Microsoft Visual Studio Middle School Power Toy 1.0 was originally created by Microsoft China to help meet the curriculum needs for teaching programming in that country. According to regulations/policies of China’s Ministry of Education (MOE) almost
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 7 Comments
Thursday, July 24, 2008 5:40 AM

Teaching About Error Messages

Here is a cartoon from Office Offline that reminds me of the sort of messages students used to write. OK maybe they were not that bad. But it was amazing the sort of things students though were acceptable messages. Messages that talked down to people,
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Wednesday, July 23, 2008 5:27 AM

Examples and Exercises

Leigh Ann Sudol has an interesting post titled The Beauty and Elegance of Computer SCIENCE . In it she talks about what makes a good example or exercise and the difference between an exercise and an example. One thing she leaves out, or perhaps just doesn’t
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Wednesday, July 16, 2008 3:32 PM

Terrarium Is Back!

If you were around in the early days of the .NET Framework you may remember a game called Terrarium. I believe that Microsoft may even have had a version running at SIGCSE one year. Bil Simser who is bringing it back fresh and updated via a CodePlex shared
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Friday, July 11, 2008 6:09 AM

The Four Digit Problem

So I was remembering a piece of code I had to write once. Honestly I don’t remember exactly why I had to write it. I think it may have been part of a set of patterned data for some test software though. In any case the problem was to generate a four digit
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 8 Comments
Thursday, July 10, 2008 6:25 PM

Recursion See Recursion Again

I don’t remember exactly when I learned recursion. If I recall correctly, and I could be wrong after almost 35 years, the version of FORTRAN that was my first programming language didn’t even support recursive subroutine calls. But somewhere along the
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 6 Comments
Monday, June 23, 2008 6:38 AM

RampUp – Learn Microsoft Technology Online

I just found out about the RampUp program. Briefly this is a program that lets people sign up for and take online training on various Microsoft developer technology such as web development and Visual Studio. There are special tracks for Java developers
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Monday, June 16, 2008 9:50 AM

Learning How to Make a Peer to Peer Zune Game

I wish I had Dan Waters’ creativity. Recently Dan posted a how to video to introduce the peer to peer Zune game he created . There are a couple of points Dan makes about this example that make it a good learning project. Zune games are perfect for peer-to-peer
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Filed under: , , ,
Monday, June 09, 2008 3:44 PM

Dream Build Play 2008

Well I see over at the XNA Team Blog they have announced the latest Dream Build Play competition for people creating XNA Games for the XBOX 360. In Dream-Build-Play 2008 you can build your dream game to compete with other game developers around the world.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
More Posts Next page »
 
Page view tracker