Weekly East Region Roundup: Vol. 4

Here are some resources and blog posts from my fellow Technical Evangelists here in East Region:

Developer

• We'll start this week with Steve Maier's announcement of his EchoNest Starter Kit for Windows Phone 8, part of my team's APIMASH starter kit collection, available on GitHub.
• Dave Isbitski has launched a new set of training courses with Lynda.com, focused on Windows Azure.
• Michael Cummings and Tara Walker are collaborating on a tutorial for building a game for Windows 8 using the MonoGame open source framework. Michael's first installment is here, Tara's overview is here.
• James Quick offers some "quick" tips for building games with GameMaker (his pun, not mine).
• Like classic games? Steve Maier notes a deal with Gameloft and Amiga Games that will bring more than 50 games to Windows Phone and Windows Store by the end of the year. Gameloft's list includes the racing game Asphalt 8: Airborne, while the Amiga Games catalog may eventually bring up to 500 classic Amiga games to these platforms. Cool stuff for gamers.
• Thinking about developing a Windows Phone app, but not sure where to start? Jim O'Neil has some good resources to share.
• Diego Rivera has a new installment of DevRadio, this one covering his Univision APIMASH Starter kit. You can view all DevRadio episodes on Channel 9.
• Spam issues on your Azure-hosted WordPress blog? Dave Isbitski has a solution for you.
• Not sure how I missed this, but Jesse Freeman has been keeping a game dev diary. Very interesting insights into his day-to-day game dev activities, decisions, and discoveries. And he's doing weekly recaps, if you just want to check those.
• Steve Maier, working with his AppRochester mobile group, held an AppRochester Junior hackathon event, teaching kids to build games with Construct 2. He also shares his son's top-down shooter game.
• Joe Healy shares a great way to get and stay connected to the local developer community in Florida, the FLA-WINDEV mailing list. He includes a link with instructions on how to sign up, and rules of the road. If you're in Mid-Atlantic, we have a similar list that you may want to join. The focus is on community leaders (user groups, etc.), but anyone interested in what's going on in Mid-Atlantic for the Microsoft-oriented developer community is welcome. If you'd like to join, just drop me a note, and I'll see that you get an invite.
• Diego wants to help you get your Windows 8 apps published. He shares 3 steps to get there, including videos.
• Want to become a game publisher on XBOX One? Michael Cummings shares the announcement of the ID@XBOX program, which is pretty exciting, if you ask me.
• Been thinking about jumping to Windows Phone? James Quick shares his experience in moving from an iPhone to the Nokia Lumia 920. As a 920 owner myself, I'm biased, but I think it's a great phone...even if I really wish I'd waited for the Lumia 1020 and it's phenomenal 41 megapixel camera.
• Tara Walker has been doing a series on game development using C#, XNA, and MonoGame 3.0, and posts part 6 on creating enemies and collision detection. Other parts:
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3
  • Part 4
  • Part 5
• Last on the dev side, but not least, Pete Brown is doing his best to destroy my gadget budget by posting his experience in controlling MIDI parameters with the Leap Motion gesture control device.

IT Pro

• Need to learn how to set up Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets? Yung Chou shares a TechNet Radio episode in which he teaches just that.
• Blain Barton shares a full list of articles from Microsoft IT Pro evangelists that will help you evaluate VMWare vs. Hyper-V, and which is right for your scenario.
• One of those articles, from our own east region virtualization guru Tommy Patterson, covers virtual processor scheduling, and how the VMWare and Hyper-V hypervisors work at the CPU level.
• Another TechNet Radio episode from Yung, this one covering the next steps with Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets.
• Lastly, for central Florida IT Pros, Blain notes that the next meeting of the Tampa Bay Infrastructure User Group will be held on September 10th.

Post Source: Devhammer's Den