Kevin Costner’s film ‘Field of Dreams’ is responsible for more startup failures than any other Holywood film ever created. In this film Ray Kinsella, a farmer played by Kevin Costner has a vision (AKA great idea), digs up his crop of corn and builds a baseball field in the middle of nowhere on the promise that ‘if he builds it, he will come’. Low and behold after some tense moments a famous dead baseball player turns up and eventually car loads of people turn up to watch baseball. So, it turns out, that if you build it, they will come. What the film fails to show (at least to my recollection), …

Voting is now open for DDD North 2014, which is excitingly going to be in Leeds. There are a lot of good talks to vote for, but my biased opinion is that the following Leeds Sharpers should all have their talks voted for.

Micro Services: conquer monoliths, before they own you - Kiran Singh

BDD, Why you should be doing it - Richard Tasker

Using Xamarin Forms to make a cross platform Agenda App - Richard Garside (AKA me)

So look through all the proposed talks and vote now (voting now closed).

The CarouselPage page is similar to a tabbed page, but you swipe between pages and there are no navigation pages. Windows Phone users will be most used to this type of UI, so you may choose to only use it there, but it will work on all platforms. Here is the XAML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<CarouselPage

xmlns="http://xamarin.com/schemas/2014/forms"

xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2009/xaml"

xmlns:local="clr-namespace:NogginXamarinFormSample;assembly=NogginXamarinFormSample"

x:Class="NogginXamarinFormSample.MyCarouselPage">

< …

The TabbedPage page is a bit like a navigation page in that it is a collection of other pages. However instead of a navigation bar you are shown a collection of tabs. Each tab has a title and may have an icon. Create a new content page using File > Add new, and then change the XAML to this (making sure your x:Class and xmlns:local are correct for your project) and also change the base class in the code behind to TabbedPage:

<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?-->

<TabbedPage

xmlns="http://xamarin.com/schemas/2014/forms"

xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2009/ …

A NavigationPage makes it very easy to create a browser like navigation stack of pages with a back button. It is a container for your pages so the XAML to for your ContentPage doesn't change, but when the app starts and you first create the page you put it inside a NavigationPage like this:

public static Page GetMainPage()

{

return new NavigationPage(MyPage());

}

Now we have a navigation page, you'll need a new page to navigate too, so create a new page and then on your first page add a button like this:

<Button Text="Press me" Clicked="OnClicked"/>

You'll then need to add an event …

The simplest of the Xamarin Page controls is the ContentPage. There is a template for this in Xamarin Studio so you can use the Add > New File... option. Here is the XAML so you can see a ContentPage along with a placeholder BoxView control so there is some content to see.

<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?-->

<contentpage

xmlns="http://xamarin.com/schemas/2014/forms"

xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2009/xaml"

x:class="NogginXamarinFormSample.MyPage"

title="A Content Page">

<boxview color="Silver" />

</contentpage>

To show …

Blender is as amazing as it is overwhelming. To be fully productive in this 3D modelling tool you need to know a lot of different keyboard shortcuts. Here are the keyboard shortcuts that I have found particularly helpful when viewing and editing an existing model in edit mode:

Selection

A - Select all / none

Pressing A will select all objects if nothing is selected, or will deselect everything if anything is selected.

B - Box selection

To select all elements in a sqaure region, press B. Then press the right mouse buttton, hold, drag and then release to select the region.

Ctrl L - Select …

There is a media war raging between the various app stores about how many apps there are, but to turn this on its head, as Richard Cambell off of .NET Rocks said 'Over 100K apps in the Windows Store is a disaster'. No one needs that many apps and how are you supposed to find the ones you need. Also, a lot of them are rubbish.

I often find myself asking what's the best x app for Windows 8 such as "what's the best eBook reader for Windows 8", or "what's the best RSS reader for Windows 8". It was to help answer these questions that I created the site Appy Ninja. It also seemed like a good excuse …

The video of my talk on MonoGame and 3D (featuring a dizzy dalek) is now live on Vimeo:

You can find the demo code on GitHub.

Other NDC Game Development Related talks

If you enjoyed this talk, you may also enjoy:

Cross-platform physics-based gaming using MonoGame and Farseer

Game and Simulator Physics for Developers, Gamers and Petrol Heads

Porting Quake III to F#: A Journey to Functional Programming

It's less than a week to go till NDC 2014. I've been going through the talks for ones I want to see and already found so many great ones that there is no chance I will get to see them all, particularly as some of them are on at the same time.

As I'm talking about game development and the other talks on this subject also look excellent here are the talks I will definitely not miss:

Game and Simulator Physics for Developers, Gamers and Petrol Heads – Alan SmithWednesday 17:40 - 18:40

Cross-platform physics-based gaming using MonoGame and Farseer – Rune Andreas GrimstadThursday 13:40 - 14:40 …