Fall Mid-Atlantic Windows App and Game Development Event Series

Starting later this month, I'll be presenting a series of events covering Windows Game and App development (3 events on each topic). The Game Development events will run on Saturdays from 10am-2pm, while the App Development events will run on Wednesdays from 1pm-5pm. All of my events will be held at our Reston, VA office.

The Schedule

Date	Topic	Registration Link
Saturday 9/28/2013	Game Dev 1	https://aka.ms/fallw8game1
Wednesday 10/2/2013	App Dev 1	https://aka.ms/fallw8app1
Saturday 10/19/2013	Game Dev 2	https://aka.ms/fallw8game2
Wednesday 10/30/2013	App Dev 2	https://aka.ms/fallw8app2
Wednesday 11/13/2013	App Dev 3	https://aka.ms/fallw8app3
Saturday 11/23/2013	Game Dev 3	https://aka.ms/fallw8game3

Each of these events will include both lecture and hands-on content.

IMPORTANT

To participate in the hands-on portion of these events you MUST bring a PC with the following installed:

• Windows 8 (any x86 or x64 version will work fine)
• Visual Studio 2012
  (for Windows Store apps, you'll need Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows 8, or higher. For Windows Phone apps, you'll need Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows Phone, or higher)

We will NOT have PCs available for attendee use, so please come prepared if you want to work hands-on. If you need a copy of either Windows 8 or Visual Studio 2012, head over to my Resources page, and check out the links under "Windows 8 Developer Downloads". For Mac users, there are a variety of boot and virtualization options you can use to run Windows 8 and Visual Studio, which are documented here:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/jj945492.aspx

The Topics

For each event in the game development series, I'll provide some introductory material for folks who may be new to the topic, along with a deeper dive into the specific development framework or tool for that week (HTML5 and Canvas along with frameworks like CreateJS, Construct 2, and WebGL/ThreeJS and Unity 3D).

For the latter portion of each game dev event, you'll spend time hands-on, designing, building, or polishing your own games. Whether you're an absolute beginner, or an experienced game dev, this will give you some focused time to make progress on your game. And I encourage attendees to come to all 3 sessions, and set a goal of publishing your game by the end of the series.

For the app development series, each event will focus on a specific Starter Kit from the Windows App and Game Starter Kits project that I and my teammates have been working on recently, each of which demonstrates the use of one or more publicly-available (and most free) APIs in a Windows Store or Windows Phone app. Each week, I'll provide an introduction to the kit (or kits, if we have time for more than one) that we'll be focusing on, and then follow that with hands-on time. Attendees can either work with the starter kit featured that week, or choose one of their own preference, and work on that. Again, I encourage attendees to attend as many sessions as possible to maximize the focused time for working on your app.

For both event series, I'll also provide some discussion of how to market your apps, and some of the tools available to help.

Call to Action

So that's the low-down on the upcoming events...the rest is up to you, namely go register via the links above!

I look forward to seeing everyone at one or more of these events.