Michael Klucher's Blog

If you’re familiar with the Windows Phone Emulator, one of the great things about it is that you can install apps like you would a phone and run them outside of a debugging session. This is useful for me to show “fancy” demos at a trade show running in the emulator. It may be useful for you if you have a similar situation in that you wanted to show off your games to colleagues, take some video, etc.

By default XNA Framework games are designed to integrate into the Games Hub, so when you deploy a game it’s actually installed in a place you can’t get to. This is easily remedied by changing the configuration of your games Genre.

1. From the Visual Studio Solution Explorer open up the Properties folder and then open the WindowsPhoneManifest.xml file.

2. Locate the Genre property, which by default is set to Apps.Games. This means by default that this application would be installed in the Game Hub.

3. Set the genre to something different, note for a default Silverlight application this is NormalApp i.e. Genre=”NormalApp”
   
   
   Once you’ve deployed your game to the emulator after changing the Genre, you should now see your game appear in the normal application list. Once you’re done deploying your game on the Windows Phone emulator you may want to change your Genre back to “Apps.Games” for when you get to run your game on a device or you submit the game for publishing!

-Michael

When interacting with users of XNA Game Studio one question that commonly comes up is  “How do I develop for Windows using XNA Game Studio 4.0?”. My quick reply usually points them to http://developer.windowsphone.com however I’ve noticed sometimes with the former, I create a bit of confusion, leading to a reply similar to “No, I want to develop for Windows, not Windows Phone.” Admittedly at first glance it may seem a bit odd to download something called the “Windows Phone Developer Tools” that allows you to write games for your Xbox 360 and Windows PC. Naming aside what we’re really doing is creating a simple and robust experience for developing games across platforms.

One of the key goals for all of us working on Windows Phone 7 was to provide a set of tools in a single download that allows you to develop anything you wanted for Windows Phone for free. It was important that you didn’t have to visit SiteA for Visual Studio, SiteB for the Silverlight SDK and then yet another SiteC to develop games with XNA Game Studio. Why not have a great experience where you have one installer that gives you everything you possibly need for developing on the phone?

For the XNA Game Studio team we also think it’s very important that we provide all of our platforms for developing on out of the box, again not making you have to choose what your interested in as a developer and download extra stuff! This is especially important for me in that we’ve invested heavily is a cross platform framework that allows you to move your code between platforms.

This is the core of why XNA Game Studio 4.0 CTP’s are included with the Windows Phone Developer tools. For our existing customers this creates a bit of a shift in thinking, where you may be accustomed to downloading something specifically called “XNA Game Studio X.X” you now download something named a bit differently, however it’s still the same product, with more features.

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback  that we could do a better job of making this clearer on our website, so we’ll get working on that. What suggestions do you have to make this more clear? How can we help make this the best experience possible for you as an XNA Game Studio customer? Hoping to get your thoughts!

-Michael

This week encompassed the days you live for…

All week I’ve been prepping for E3, and will all the Kinect news it might be easy to forget about the effort of putting Xbox LIVE in your pocket later this year with Windows Phone 7. If you’ve been following me on twitter, you might have caught me talking about flashing devices, loading demos and getting everything buttoned up for shipping XNA Game Studio 4.0.

My Windows Phone 7 device has really become my phone. I keep it updated with the latest builds and use it as I would any phone I’ve ever owned. I play games(from App Week), check my email, listen to music, and surf the web. This week started out like most others, I flashed my phone, entered my Windows Live ID, and went into the Games Hub…

Whoa! That’s me! By me of course I mean my Gamertag, Avatar, and latest Achievement in the Games Hub! I couldn’t believe it, we’ve had the Games Hub working for a while, but up until now it’s been on internal networks inside Microsoft. This week was the first time I really got to see my “true” gamer identity on the phone.

In that moment everything that we’ve been talking about and everything we’ve been showing became so very real to me. I mean here I was with Xbox LIVE in my hand! It’s an incredible experience to see something that many of us have been working on really come together and shine.

It almost goes without saying that I’m so excited for the Windows Phone 7 release this holiday, and can’t wait for each of you to have the same experience I did of having the Xbox LIVE experience on the phone! We’re getting closer every day and it will be here before you know it. There’s a lot more to talk about from E3 this year, but for now I just had to share with you my excitement of seeing this working.

-Michael

If you’ve run into some trouble installing the latest version of the Windows Phone Developer Tools from http://developer.windowsphone.com we’re here to help!

Specifically one issue with installing the Windows Phone Developer Tools with Silverlight already installed on your machine is coming up more and more, luckily Aaron Stebner has provided a great post on working around the issue.

If you find yourself getting an installation error that says “Setup could not install the following component: Microsoft Silverlight 4.0” 

You’ll want to follow these instructions:

As Aaron mentioned, will have this fixed up in a future release. If you’re having other problems, be sure to to stop by and ask for help on the Windows Phone Developer forums.

-Michael

If you use Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone you may notice by default it’s not configured in the same way as its Professional or Ultimate counterparts. Because some options aren’t exposed to you by default it may make it difficult to switch between various project configurations and platforms. This is useful functionality especially for XNA Framework games that span across Windows, Xbox 360, and Windows Phone.

If you’re like me want to explicitly control the platforms and configurations you’re building for at any given time it’s a pretty simple thing to configure, you just need to do what to do. Follow the instructions below and you’ll have all the control you need.

For this example, I have a default install of Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, I also have a multiplatform XNA Game Studio solution created that contains Windows Phone and Xbox 360 projects, but this isn’t required.

Switch to Expert Settings

To make the most of building different solution configurations the first thing you’ll want to do is switch over to using “Expert Settings”. From the Tools menu select Settings->Expert Settings.

You’ll notice that this adds some more toolbars and menus to Visual Studio, but more importantly adds the ability to easily switch between Debug/Release solution configurations of your projects.

Selecting between platforms using Solution Platforms

When you’re working on a game that spans across multiple platforms, it makes a lot of sense to easily be able to build and deploy for a specific platform at a time. To make this easy, you can add the Solutions Platforms dropdown to your toolbar in Visual Studio.

To add the Solution Platforms to your toolbar:

1. Select Tools then Customize.
2. Select the Commands tab, followed by the Toolbar radio button.
3. Select Standard from the Toolbar dropdown, it should look like the picture below:
   
4. Next, hit the Add Command… button
5. Making sure that the Build category is selected, scroll down to the bottom of the list and select Solution Platforms and then OK. If you don’t see the Build category make sure you selected Expert Settings using the above instructions.
   
6. Using the Move Up and Move Down buttons position the dropdown where you would like it to appear on your toolbar, for example I placed it right after the Solution Configurations dropdown.
   
7. Finally, select Close

Now, you’ll be able to quickly and easily switch between just building for Windows Phone or the other platforms in your solution.

If you ever want to go back to what you had before you can always select Tools then Settings->Basic Settings then reverting all the other stuff by selecting Tools followed by Settings->Reset.

Hope you found this handy to get you up and running!

-Michael

Things on the XNA Game Studio team have taken and interesting turn this week. I’m hearing strange sounds coming from down the hall, lots of random laughter, and people constantly saying “Hey, take a look at this!”

Why is all this madness going on? It’s because we’ve reached one of my personal favorite milestones in our schedule for XNA Game Studio which we call “AppWeek”. AppWeek is dedicated time in our product schedule where the team takes a break from working on feature development and focuses on writing some games. There are no boundaries in what team members can choose to tackle, it can be very simplistic or something that pushes the XNA Framework to its limits!

Beyond being fun, AppWeek is a very important part of the product development cycle in our group. It helps the entire team step back, put on our customer hat, and use the product as all of you do every day. We try to avoid using any “Microsoft Magic”, workarounds, and tweaks. This means we avoid information/tools users may not know about or have access to. It gives us a way identify issues holistically and find nasty blocking issues that need to get fixed before the product is ready for RTM! Some of these things simply can’t be indentified working on singular features, which is why we use focus on building something start to finish.

It also generates a lot of the educational content that you see on Creators Club Online. Many of the games we write end up as samples. The whole process generates a lot of knowledge that we feel is important to share through blogs and product documentation. By the way, did I also mention that it’s FUN?

The team has another week left before we start to wrap up AppWeek for XNA Game Studio 4.0. Much of the team, including myself, are working on some games for Windows Phone 7 and trying out our newest platform. It’s incredible to develop on, and I am really having some fun coding again!

Once we’ve wrapped up I’ll work with the team so we can share with you some of the great content the team has put together and showcase some of the what we did with XNA Game Studio 4.0!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I gotta get back to working on my game…

-Michael

Yesterday was a blast chatting with Mike Benkovich on MSDN Radio about game development for Windows Phone! The show is pretty new, and looking at the roster of past as well as upcoming guests, I feel pretty humbled to be included.

Because the show is live, one of the things we didn’t find out till the end of the call is that that users needed to hit a key on their phone to ask a question if they dialed in. I didn’t realize it and think many of the shows callers weren’t aware of this either. One of the callers was nice enough to stick around and explained afterwards.

I wanted to make sure got your burning questions answered, which is probably why called in! If you have a question that we didn’t get to yesterday, simply drop me a comment in this post or use my contact form to drop me a line. I’ll make sure to get you an answer!

For those of you that missed it here is a link to the recording on Channel 9. Hopefully I’ll get to come back sometime and take more questions live, as it was a lot of fun! Until then, thanks for tuning in!

-Michael

Looking for more info on developing games on Windows Phone 7? Want to know more on using XNA Game Studio 4.0 and Silverlight for games? Curious how Xbox LIVE integrates with Windows Phone?

Next week Monday, April 19, 2010 at 9:00 AM Pacific Time, I’ll be joining Mike Benkovich to answer your Windows Phone and XNA gaming questions on MSDN Radio!

MSDN Radio is a weekly Developer talk-show that helps answer your questions about the latest Microsoft news, solutions, and technologies. We dive into the challenges of deciphering today’s technology stack. Register today and have a chance to call-in and talk with the experts on the air, or just tune in to the show.

To register for the event and be part of the live broadcast simply visit this link: http://bit.ly/b5Py5j

Hope to chat with you Monday!

-Michael

Visual Studio 2010 has been released and is now available for download in its final form! Congratulations to the Visual Studio and .NET teams on a great new release.

Many of you read my blog because you develop with XNA Game Studio. I want to make everyone who uses our latest toolset aware that the current release of the Windows Phone Developer Tools, which includes XNA Game Studio 4.0, does not yet support the “RTM” or release version of Visual Studio 2010. If you’re using the Windows Phone Developer Tools/XNA Game Studio 4.0 you’ll want to wait for an update that we’ll have more information on in the coming weeks. This update will support the final version of Visual Studio 2010. 

There are also several other options available such as using a virtual machine, be sure to take a look at Charlie Kindel’s post: http://bit.ly/9eRKV6 for more information.

-Michael

As mentioned in my post yesterday, we’ve made several new samples available on Creators Club Online for use with the Windows Phone Developer Tools/XNA Game Studio 4.0.

Mini-Games

• Reach Graphics Demo – Known as the “Shawn Hargreaves MIX ‘10 demo”, this mini-game shows off the new configurable effects in XNA Game Studio 4.0 and how they can be implemented in your game!

• Snow Shovel – Race to collect as much snow with your shovel as you can before time expires! This game shows a simple 2D sprite based game with touch input and other game mechanics!

Samples

• Primitives and Primitives 3D – We’ve updated these samples for Windows Phone 7 Series, showing you how to render both2D & 3D primitives in XNA Game Studio 4.0!

If you have questions or trouble with the samples head over to http://forums.xna.com and share your experiences!

-Michael