Legend of the Greasepole gets the Silverlight 4 + Analytics treatment
Legend of the Greasepole has been ported to Silverlight 4 and reincarnated on http://greasepole.net.
Greasepole is the long-suffering game about multimedia tribute to the inexplicable Engineering traditions at Queen’s University in Canada. Over 50 students contributed to the project back in the day.
There’s a significant AI component to Greasepole – the autonomous “frosh” characters have models for learning and communicating with one another.
A couple of years ago I ported it from C++ to C# and XNA. I abstracted out a series of services (graphics, sound, input, timer, persistence) so that it might ultimately be ported again to a platform like, say, Silverlight or something. Why? I don’t know, maybe I’m a little obsessed with the illusion of preservation.
The Silverlight 2 version was a bit shaky. Silverlight 4′s hardware acceleration and bitmap caching make it pretty solid. It is also awesome to hear from friends that it apparently works on the Mac.
Analyze These… Shenanigans
I also added a little analytics. Although it should probably be said that the Greasepole event largely defies analysis, the game itself does not, and so this is the first time I can let someone poke their head in and see how the froshies are doing all around the world.
Back in the day, the worldwide best time was in excess of a mere 53 minutes. But I had to learn that by way of Sean Murray (class of ’05; wonder where he is now) sending me a screenshot. Now the interwebs will tell us immediately. (Admittedly, it’s not a fair fight against Sean, because the frosh are now permanently in “keener” mode, and the Options screen has been replaced by a dozen trendy Achievements for you to “unlock”).
So get going stalling those frosh, and my question for you is – what statistics would you like to see?
“Number of pints Al ‘Pop Boy’ Burchell has quaffed?”
“Number of hippos fed”?
“Height of human pyramid vs time”?
I am going to enjoy cooking up visualizations for some of those.
(Coding notes: A few new VS2010 things helped with this update: Web.config transformation (rocks), improvements to Web Publish functionality, XAML designer, Entity Framework experience… and more.)
Play Legend of the Greasepole Online Edition.
Windows Azure’s Pricing Model Discourages Small-Scale Apps (for now?)
The death of Silverlight Streaming (a free hosting service provided by Microsoft) made me finally think through the cost of hosting small apps and sites on Windows Azure.
Although Azure’s pricing model might make sense for Enterprise scenarios, the math doesn’t seem to add up for smaller-scale applications, or for developers who wish to evaluate the Azure platform.
Let’s work through the TCO of a simple site I considered moving to Windows Azure.
Continue ReadingTechDays 2009: ‘What’s New in Silverlight 3′ Follow-up
Thanks to everyone who came to my “What’s New in Silverlight 3″ presentation this morning at Microsoft Canada’s TechDays 2009 event in Halifax.
A few months ago, I delivered a Silverlight 3 presentation at a Toronto usergroup event. The follow-up resources I referenced after that presentation are thorough, and still relevant today, so please visit that page for links to online Silverlight 3 resources.
The screenshot below is from one of today’s demos: a Silverlight 3 app, running in Google Chrome, capturing stills from a stream of HD video that I shot at dusk last night with my trusty Nikon D90.
If you’re looking for evidence that Silverlight runs in Chrome, you can point it (or, for that matter, any browser with Silverlight installed) at the much cooler Silverlight demo running here – it’s mai FractLOL.
It's today's Silverlight 3 WriteableBitmap sample, running in Google Chrome!
If you have more Silverlight questions or follow-up, please don’t hesitate to contact me through the blog [or just mail rob at rob burke dot net].
p.s. A few weeks ago I presented “Building Modular Applications in Silverlight and WPF” at TechDays Toronto, so if you’re interested in line-of-business apps in Silverlight, you might also find that follow-up helpful.
Continue ReadingTechDays 2009: ‘Building Modular Applications using Silverlight and WPF’ Follow-up
I’ve just finished delivering the “Building Modular Applications using Silverlight and WPF” session at Microsoft Canada’s TechDays 2009 event in Toronto.
What a difference a year makes! At last year’s TechDays, my presentation was all: “Silverlight is new and awesome! Let’s lap around some awesome Silverlight features!”
But this year, as Silverlight and WPF have gained some maturity, many of us are now working on more complex projects enabled by these frameworks.
So this year’s theme, appropriately, was designing for change. It was about taming complexity in real-world Silverlight and WPF apps with patterns, conventions, examples, and a little glue code.
What we covered
After a brief primer on the MVVM pattern, the core of the presentation was a lap around Prism, a.k.a. the Composite Application Guidance for Silverlight and WPF released by Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices group.
We looked at the structure provided by Prism’s Shell and Bootstrapper, demystified Dependency Injection (over breakfast), and then explored the Region Manager, Modules, the Event Aggregator, and Commanding.
Taming Complexity and Designing for Change
Prism's Stock Trader Reference Implementation
Complexity in the software development lifecycle comes in many forms, including but not limited to:
- integrating multiple disparate sources of data,
- dealing with changing requirements,
- managing features delivered by distributed dev teams,
- creating complex interactive views,
- rapidly skilling up new resources on a project,
- cleanly separating concerns for different roles (like designer and developer), and…
- well, I could go on.
It seems to me like a good way to tame complexities like these is to design for change. Prism helps you do this. So does MVVM.
I’ve worked with WPF since it was called Avalon, but only recently started using Prism.
When I go back now and look at my pre-Prism code, it looks fine in parts, but organizationally, it reeks of uninformed, trainwreck stuff. If I could speak to Rob vPrevious, I would insist that he take the time to learn Prism.
Do your time in Prism
I did my time in Prism, so I did
So my call to action for all serious WPF and Silverlight devs is:
- Do your time in Prism. Invest the time to get the Prism framework, software and documentation from Codeplex and read the lucid documentation on MSDN.
- Don’t be intimidated (like I was) by terms like Dependency Injection Container and Inversion of Control.
- Check out Prism’s Stock Trader Reference Implementation, and
- Even if you don’t decide to use Prism on your project, think about conventions, and patterns, and how your code will respond to change.
Finally – if you are a Silverlight or WPF developer, and are looking for a place to work on interesting projects on a scale that demands you plan for change, please contact me.
For those of you who came out today, thanks for the engaging conversations afterwards, and I hope you found the presentation a helpful primer on Prism. May it help you get up the learning curve and start using the P&P guidance in your own applications!
Please write me with your own Prism thoughts and stories.
This year, the theme was designing for change. It was about taming complexity with patterns, conventions, examples, and glue code.
it was a deeper Senior Dev / Architect level discussion that discussed the MVVM pattern and Prism, the Composite Application Guidance for Silverlight and WPF.