Tag Archives: wp7

Tap N Match a cool WP7 game ! Vote on Facebook !

Events, Silverlight, Windows Phone, ,

Today I need help from all my readers across the globe ! Please vote for our TapNMatch WP7 game here

Microsoft France is organizing since a couple of months a Windows Phone 7 contest in order to create cool applications. Applications are demonstrated using a short video which is posted on Facebook. The goal is to have the maximum number of “Like” in order to be selected for the final.10 applications are going to be selected, and on October 7th, each selected developers will have to present very quickly (2min) its application in front of an amazing jury made of Steve Ballmer and CEOs of french companies.

A coworker and I have been working on a Windows Phone 7 game called Tap N Match created using Silverlight. The goal of the game is to associate “targets” which have a number either by creating pairs (5;5) or sequences (1;2). Here is quick description of the game:

  • best scores are recorded in the cloud using Windows Azure
  • use of the Bing APIs in order to determine the country of the player when posting a new score
  • use of the Pivot control

Here is the presentation of our application on YouTube:

In order to vote for our application:

  1. Go to : http://www.facebook.com/Developpeurs.net
  2. “Like” this page
  3. Go to the video of my game : http://www.facebook.com/Developpeurs.net#!/video/video.php?v=434150728926
  4. “Like” my video 🙂

Thank you very much for your help !

[WP7] Sound effect in a Silverlight Windows Phone 7 application

Windows Phone

A coworker and I are currently working on a simple Silverlight game for the Windows Phone 7 platform. In order to give some feedback to our end-user, we decided to add sound effects. Here is a very short post about how we did that.

The first thing is to reference the Microsoft.Xna.Framework assembly in your project. This assembly is needed to access the low-level sound component of XNA right from your Silverlight application. You also need to have your sound effect in a WAVE format file.

Then we created a simple action (from the Blend Behavior toolkit) which is a TargetedTriggerAction:

public class SoundEffectAction : TargetedTriggerAction
{
    public string Source
    {
        get { return (string)GetValue(SourceProperty); }
        set { SetValue(SourceProperty, value); }
    }

    public static readonly DependencyProperty SourceProperty = DependencyProperty.Register(
        "Source", 
        typeof(string), 
        typeof(SoundEffectAction), 
        new PropertyMetadata(string.Empty));

    protected override void Invoke(object parameter)
    {
        if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.Source)
        {
            var stream = TitleContainer.OpenStream(this.Source);
            if (stream != null)
            {
                var effect = SoundEffect.FromStream(stream);
                FrameworkDispatcher.Update();
                effect.Play();
            }
        }
    }
}

Using this action, we’re able to wire sound effect right in Blend which produces the following XAML code:

Simple, isn’t it ?

[WP7] Beta build of the Windows Phone 7 tools is available

Windows Phone

I guess many Windows Phone 7 developers have been waiting for this news since many weeks. It’s finally official: the Beta build of the Windows Phone 7 tools is out. If you want to download the new version here is the link.

This new version has been released during WPC (Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference). For more information, please check-out:

  • the post on the Windows Phone Developer Tools blog.
  • this post by Jaime Rodriguez about all breaking change between the April CTP Refresh and the Beta build
  • this post by the Blend team about the new features available in Blend
  • the release note

Here are a summary of the changes in this new version:

  • Despite HW acceleration effects have been removed from the platform (DropShadow and Blur effects are now no-op). This feature might come back later.
  • Compatibility with Blend 4 RTM
  • API near final
  • Various fixes

Note that panorama and pivot controls are coming in the next weeks… Grab you copy now and enjoy Windows Phone 7 development 🙂

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c8496c2a-54d9-4b11-9491-a1bfaf32f2e3&displaylang=en