Windows-Phone

I’ve been using a Dell XPS 15 for a week, and this is my review (from a developer’s point of view): Pros: Display: It has a nice 15" display with a resolution of 3200 x 1800 (higher DPI than the MacBook Retina Display). Weight: It is a light notebook, of about 2 kilos. It is very fast. And it boots in a just a few seconds. It doesn’t come with crapware The keyboard is Ok. I like that you can toggle the Functions keys by pressing Fn + Esc. Great unboxing experience, but who cares? Cons: ...

Goals Compile and run cocos2d-x tests on the emulator Set a breakpoint in Visual Studio. Running cpp-test on the Emulator 1. Download cocos2d-x v3.0 2. Unzip it and then go to cocos2d-x/build directory $ c d c o c o s 2 d - x / b u i l d 3. Open cocos2d-wp8.vc2012.sln with Visual Studio $ s t a r t c o c o s 2 d - w p 8 . v c 2 0 1 2 . s l n 4. Set cpp-tests (Windows Phone Silverlight 8) as the default project: Go to the Solution Explorer Right click on cpp-tests (Windows Phone Silverlight 8) Click on Set as StartUp Project 5. Run cpp-tests on the Emulator Press the Emulator 8.1 WVGA 4 inch button If an Hyper-V error appears, then you have to enable Hyper-V: Enable Hyper-V on the BIOS And then enable Hyper-V on Windows 8.1 Pro (it won’t work on the ‘Regular’ edition). 6. If the following Dialog pops-up, just press Retry: And that’s all. You should see the cpp-tests running on the Emulator:

So you have Windows 8.1 + Visual Studio 2013 installed. Now you need to install a git client. My workflow on Mac is: I use git command line about 70% of the time. In the reaming 30% I’m using Tower, Kaleidoscope and Xcode. So, I was looking for something similar for Windows. And so far, this is my current setup: Mysysgit, for git command line. SourceTree for GUI I couldn’t find a good stand-alone diff-viewer, so I’m using SourceTree’s What I like about Mysysgit is that it installs a Unix-like shell, with git auto-completion and you can also see the current branch in the shell prompt. That is very handy. ...

In order to have a better understanding of Windows Phone, I’m migrating from my old and tiny iPhone 4S (3.5" display) to the huge Lumia 1520 (6" display),(Thanks MS for the gift). I’m also switching carriers, from Verizon to AT&T. My very first impression is that Windows Phone is different. I’m not saying it is worse or better than iOS, it is just different. It is an smartphone , so it has Apps, a Store, Maps, Messages, and more… but with a different interface. If you are coming from iOS or Android it might take a while to get used to it. ...

Let’s compare some prices. iOS: Xcode is free You have to pay $99 per year in order to submit games to the AppStore. Android: The SDK and NDK are free There is a $25 one-time-only fee in order to submit games to Google Play Windows Phone 8: VS Express 2013 and Windows Phone 8 SDK are free. If you want something more complete, you can get VS Online Pro for $45 per month, or VS Pro (offline version) for $499. You have to pay $19 as an individual or $99 as a company per year in order to submit games to the Windows Store Random thoughts: ...

So, by now you should have Windows 8.1 up and running. The next thing is to install the Windows Phone SDK. A few days ago I tried the Windows Phone 8.0 SDK (it comes with Visual Studio Express 2012) and it works OK. But VS 2013 Update 2 RC (announced 2 days ago) already comes with the Windows Phone SDK 8.1 (which also allows you to develop for WP 8). This is good, because you don’t need to have two versions of VS installed in your machine in order to develop for Windows and Windows Phone 8. ...

My dual boot Linux/Win machine. Not powerful enough for serious Win Phone development. Get a good, dedicated Windows machine. Not like this one. VMWare / Parallels is OKish… but I wouldn’t recommend it. My current notebook has 2 big issues: Low performance and a low-quality trackpad. I remember when I switched from a Dell XPS 12" to a MacBook 13" around 2008. One thing that called my attention was the size of the MacBook’s trackpad: it was huge. And now it is the opposite: I find that most Windows notebooks have a crappy trackpad: too small and unresponsive. ...

My background: I’ve been developing game engines & games for iOS for the past 6 years Two years ago I started developing for Android And this week I started developing for Windows Phone …and so my journey begins.