We had a GREAT time running the RockPaperAzure Grand Tournament Wednesday. We had a total of 302 players from around the world, and the top players in the finals were: We saw some amazing strategies, and learned a lot along the way. We intend to keep the site running with more contests along the way – if you have any interest in running a competition for a user group, conference, or other activity, we’d be happy to create a round for you on the site. Contact us for info. Server Load N...
[More]
Just a quick tip for those in the Grand Tournament. There are 2 very common reasons we’re seeing bots get rejected – we’ll call it the red text of death that appears when you submit a bot, but it fails code analysis. If all you see is “Bot Successfully Uploaded,” then move along, nothing to see here. The most common are coders adding debugging statements into their code. We do block the Diagnostics namespace (among a few others), so it’s quite likely any debugging code will trigger a fai...
[More]
We’re back – this time with an International Grand Tournament in Rock, Paper, Azure. So what’s new? First, we heard many folks loud and clear that they weren’t happy it was U.S. residents only. So, now’s your chance – we’ve opened up the tournament to Canada, the UK, Sweden, New Zealand, Germany, China, and of course the USA. We’ve also included country flags in the leaderboard: Next, we’ve changed some of the rules. Specifically, players are now “blind” w...
[More]
By way of Glen Gordon: Two great community guys – Chris Eargle and Chris Williams - are setting up community led Windows Phone Garage events next week in Columbia and Greenville. Remember, at a Windows Phone Garage you get instruction on the basics of creating Windows Phone apps, but also you get a lot of time to build your app, with help from onsite experts. In addition, one attendee who showcases his app (in development or complete) at the event will win a free Windows Phone device! Register ASAP...
[More]
I spend a lot of time on the road and often need to stay online. Back in the Windows Mobile days, it was pretty easy to turn a WM6.x device into a personal Wifi hotspot; unfortunately this isn’t so easy on Windows Phone 7. In fact, most of us now carry Verizon air cards/USB modems for alternative access. While this has worked great, I often would prefer a hotspot: I might need to have other devices like a Zune player get online, or might need to share an internet connection....
[More]
You’ve heard about cloud computing and already know it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread – and maybe you’ve already attended a Microsoft Azure Boot Camp or other event introducing you to the cloud and detailing the various parts of the Windows Azure platform. Well we’ll do that too… in the first half hour! The rest of the time we’ll have a bit of fun with Azure by taking a look at some cool demos and poking under the hood. We’ll then t...
[More]
During a presentation the other day to the Charlotte ALT.NET group, I made a joke that Rock, Paper, Azure is doing something completely ridiculous: we invite people to write code and we’ll run it arbitrarily. (Well, not really arbitrarily, but it does present a unique security challenge.) We’ve naturally had a few interesting submissions, so I’m posting some of them here for interest sake. First up: Thread.Sleep(...);
We see this one fairly often. In a game where you h...
[More]
In part 1, I detailed some of the specifics in getting the Rock, Paper, Azure (RPA) up and running in Windows Azure. In this post, I’ll start detailing some of the other considerations in the project – in many ways, this was a very real migration scenario of a reasonably complex application. (This post doesn’t contain any helpful info in playing the game, but those interested in scalability or migration, read on!) The first issue we had with the application was scalability. Every time pla...
[More]
In a few weeks, my colleagues Glen and Joe will be in Charlotte (and a few other locations around that time) holding their successful Windows Phone garage events. The latest event is coming to Charlotte on May 24th! Here’s the breakdown: 9 – 10 am Introduction to Windows Phone Development No experience with Windows Phone 7 development? No problem. During this optional session at the start of the day we will cover the fundamentals of Windows Phone Silverlight and XNA Development. We'll explore...
[More]
In a previous post about locking in Rock, Paper, Azure, I said this somewhat offhand:
In this case, there’s no reason to use such code in a bot. The only time you’d need to is if your bot has a static method/object reference, but that’s a bad idea in a bot because it will lead to unpredictable results. Your bot should have only instance members.
I should’ve called that out more, and in this case, we have a player who lost because of it. It’s especially tough because thin...
[More]