Wow! eBook – Blog

Book Description

In just 24 sessions of one hour or less, you’ll learn how to build high performance games for Windows Phone 7 with Microsoft’s free XNA 4.0 toolset. Using this book’s straightforward, step-by-step approach, you’ll master all the skills you need to design, develop, test, and publish highly playable games for any WP7 device. You’ll learn how to integrate game logic, touch screen user input, bitmaps, animations, audio, physics effects, GPS location services, and more. Each lesson builds on what you’ve already learned, culminating in the construction of a complete game—and giving you a rock-solid foundation for real-world success!

Step-by-step instructions carefully walk you through the most common Windows Phone 7 game development tasks.

Quizzes and Exercises at the end of each chapter help you test your knowledge.

By the Way notes present interesting information related to the discussion.

Did You Know? tips offer advice or show you easier ways to perform tasks.

Watch Out! cautions alert you to possible problems and give you advice on how to avoid them.

Learn how to… Download Now »

Book Description

Developing games for Windows Phone 7, a new mobile platform, is your big chance to impact the world of mobile games. The XNA 4.0 for Windows Phone 7 integrates a lot of capabilities from software and hardware for you to create incredible games. The next generation of mobile games will be built by you.

Windows Phone 7 XNA Cookbook is the best choice for you to make a game on Windows Phone 7. The book helps you to master the indispensable techniques to create your games using XNA 4.0. From the basics such as animating a 2D sprite and interacting with the customized graphical user interface to the more challenging such as 3D graphic rendering and collision detection.

This comprehensive cookbook covers all the essential areas of XNA game development for Windows Phone 7, such as approaches to control the sensors, gestures and typical kinds of cameras. We also have recipes for sprite animation, texture rendering, and graphical user interface development that will give you a powerful tool to work with 2D effects. After this we move onto the more juicy stuff with recipes covering 3D graphic rendering and collision detection, and major ways to improve your loading efficiency. You will also work with Xbox live so you can take your game global. Finally, no mobile game development book would be complete without a look at performance optimization to make your games run faster. Windows Phone 7 XNA Cookbook will equip you with the firepower to rock the game world.

What you will learn from this book Download Now »

Book Description

The Windows Phone 7 platform, now recently updated, provides a remarkable opportunity for Windows developers to create state-of-the-art mobile applications using their existing skills and a familiar toolset. Pro Windows Phone 7 Development, Second Edition helps you unlock the potential of this platform and create dazzling, visually rich, and highly functional applications for the Windows Phone Marketplace—including using new features like copy-and-paste and API improvements in the NoDo and Mango update waves.

For developers new to the Windows Phone platform—whether .NET, iPhone, or Android developers—this book starts by introducing the features and specifications of the Windows Phone series, and then leads you through the complete application development process. You’ll learn how to use Microsoft technologies like Silverlight, .NET, the XNA Framework, Visual Studio, and Expression Blend effectively, how to take advantage of the device’s sensors with the location service, accelerometer, and touch, how to make your apps location-aware using GPS data, how to utilize the rich media capabilities of the Windows Phone series, and much more. Finally, you’ll receive a full tutorial on how to publish and sell your application through the Windows Phone Marketplace. And in this second edition, learn quickly and easily how to take advantage of new API capabilities and HTML5 support right in your browser.

What you’ll learn

• The specifications and capabilities of the Windows Phone series and how to harness that power in your applications Download Now »

Book Description

Windows Phone 7.5 (code-named Mango) marks a significant upgrade to Microsoft’s smartphone products. Packed with sophisticated new features and functionality, the device is a .NET developer’s dream, easily programmable using Silverlight, XNA and C#.

Windows Phone Recipes utilizes a proven problem-solution approach, providing a concise guide to all the phone’s features in recipe book format. First, the problem you’re facing is identified. Then, a clear explanation of the solution is given, supported by a fully-worked code sample that demonstrates the feature in action.

All aspects of development, configuration, testing, and distribution are covered. You’ll find recipes that unlock advanced user interface features, deal with data storage, integrate with cloud services, add media and location services, and much more. It’s everything you’ll need to put a professional polish on your Windows Phone 7.5 applications!

What you’ll learn

• Understand how to design, develop, test and distribute your Windows Phone 7.5 applications
• Create compelling user interfaces using all the phone’s features, including the camera, GPS and accelerometer
• Learn how to debug your applications and package them for distribution Download Now »

Book Description

XNA Game Studio enables hobbyists and independent game developers to easily create video games, and now gives that power to Visual Basic developers. XNA lets you bring your creations to life on Windows, the Xbox 360 and the Windows Phone platforms. The latest release of XNA has added support to Visual Basic and therefore, Visual Basic developers now have the power to give life to their creativity with XNA.

This book covers both the concepts and the implementations necessary to get you started on bringing your own creations to life with XNA. It presents four different games, including a puzzler, space shooter, multi-axis shoot ‘em up, and a jump-and-run platformer. Each game introduces new concepts and techniques to build a solid foundation for your own ideas and creativity.

This book details the creation of four games, all in different styles, from start to finish using Visual Basic and the Microsoft XNA framework. Beginning with the basics of drawing images to the screen, the book then incrementally introduces sprite animation, particles, sound effects, tile-based maps, and path finding. It then explores combining XNA with Windows Forms to build an interactive map editor, and builds a platform-style game using the editor-generated maps. Finally, the book covers the considerations necessary for deploying your games to the Xbox 360 platform.

By the end of the book, you will have a solid foundation of game development concepts and techniques as well as working sample games to extend and innovate upon. Download Now »

Book Description

Windows Phone 7.5 Mango contains support for apps written in Silverlight or XNA. These apps can store data on the device, and also load and manipulate data from “the cloud” and other web services.

This Windows Phone 7.5 Data Cookbook has a range of recipes to help you apply data handling concepts. You will be able to apply the knowledge gained from these recipes to build your own apps effectively.

This Windows Phone 7.5 Data Cookbook starts with data binding concepts at the UI layer and then shows different ways of saving data locally and externally in databases. The book ends with a look at the popular MVVM software design pattern. The recipes contained in this book will make you an expert in the areas of data access and storage.

What you will learn from this book:

• Create data binding to user interface elements with any data source
• Create and save user settings to local isolated storage for later consumption.
• Explore different on device database options such as commercial Perst, open source SQLite and Microsoft’s SQL CE.
• Create and consume simple web services and understand LINQ features.
• Scale the applications and work with WCF web services.
• Understand REST and call different social media services like Twitter and RSS Feeds.
• Create and understand MVVM model. Download Now »