I've been wokring again on my game framework, BeastMUD. (https://github.com/lionsguard/beastmud/tree/v0.5)

I got the main framework functional and made some progress with a mapping tool for building and connecting rooms with auto generated dungeons.

Packt Publishing, the folks who published our Microsoft Silverlight 4 Business Application Development book have included some of the chapters of that book in a new mashup of their best selling Silverlight books. The new book is called Managing Media and Data in Microsoft Silverlight 4 and features great chapters from several different authors’ Silverlight books, covering the gambit from XAML and layouts to SharePoint integration to REST and RIA services.

In addition, they are also offering a discount on all Microsoft technology books during the month of May so be sure to check that out as well at Packt’s Microsoft Carnival!

Silverlight is still a great technology for business development, it eases deployment issues with distributed software, provides an interactive experience for users via a browser while maintaining the power of C# in the development life cycle.

I have made some decent progress on scaling Perenthia down and re-tooling it for more basic HTML/mobile access. I have the server core complete and am working on the UI components. The first step will be to get the adventuring/combat piece finished and then move on to the crafting system.

The abstract core server pieces I decided to put into a separate library and made the source available on GitHub. I call it “Leo” and it provides the basic game server and provides some interfaces and associated libraries for processing input through the server. Since I am using SignalR for client to server communication I included some code in Leo to provide a input processor and PersistentConnection. The TestConsole project was something I used to initially setup the game libraries. They are now linked into my Perenthia solution and will be updated as I find the need while working on Perenthia.

The Leo source is very early stages and is subject to change frequently. It is also intended primarily for low traffic games such as iOS, Facebook, etc. I will up some instructions once it gets a little more stable.

Here is a screenshot of Perenthia’s new progress so far:

I ran into some issues attempting to test Facebook Credits with ASP.NET locally during development. I have an MVC3 site that is running in the Azure Development Environment and I wanted to be able to test the credits functionality. I played around with a bunch of settings, etc. and finally got a combination of things working that allows me to test credits locally. Below are the steps I took:

1. Set the web project as the startup project in the Visual Studio solution. Unless you need specific Azure functionality this is much easier since Azure does not want to accept traffic from anything other than localhost and credits testing will not work with localhost.

2. Set your web project to run using IIS or IIS Express bound to http://localhost. (Project Properties -> Web -> Servers) If you want to use IIS Express and have IIS installed you will need to unbind the default web site from port 80. ** I also had to stop the Web Deployment Agent Service as it binds to port 80.

3. I used DynDns.com to provide a host name for my web site and entered this as the domain for both the Canvas Url and Credits Callback Url. The Credits callback will not work with 127.0.0.1 or localhost so you need some external domain. I tried using a made up entry in my HOSTS file but Facebook needs a real address since they initiate the request for the callback.

4. I edited the applicationHost.config file under %userprofile%\documents\iisexpress to allow my DynDns name like so (system.applicationHost/sites node):

<site name="WebAppName" id="1">

                <application path="/" applicationPool="Clr4IntegratedAppPool">

                    <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="DirToWeb" />

                </application>

                <bindings>

                    <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:80:localhost" />

                    <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:80:dyndnsname" />

                </bindings>

            </site>

5. Do any port forwarding on your router and enable port 80 on your firewall.

6. Setup the callback code according to the Facebook Docs, I even used the JS sample code to test.

After many months of not working on Perenthia I find myself once again desiring to see it complete. The last revision I did on Perenthia was some time ago and involved a Silverlight UI with a C#/SQL 2008 backend.

During the course of development on Perenthia I discovered some of the pitfalls of attempting to develop a role playing game by one self. Mainly, the inability to handle content creation on a large enough scale as to appeal to players and have enough interactivity to make the game fun. I have been thinking lately of ways to reduce that load and still keep the game fun. I have some new ideas I want to put into place and re-release Perenthia with these concepts.

Among the changes I plan to implement will be scaling the game down to function solely in an HTML environment. This will enable me to provide a mobile version that works on all phones with a browser and keep the feature set the same for both phone and web.

I have begun to refactor pieces of the code and am making heavy use of jquery for the character creation screen.

A sample chapter for Silverlight 4 Business Application Development: Beginner’s Guide has posted a sample chapter online. Be sure to check it out, this will give a good idea of the flow of the book and how we get right down to details attempting to solve a real world problem.

You can purchase the book from the publisher and it is also available on Amazon.

The book that Frank and I wrote titled Silverlight 4 Business Application Development : Beginner's Guide has been published and is available! The book is targeted at those .NET developers who want to enter the realm of Silverlight development. The book will start you off coding right away and help get the concepts of Silverlight down so you can start building Rich Internet Applications for your company or clients.

With the release of Silverlight 4 RC the Windows Phone 7 developer tools I wanted to take a stab at building a Silverlight application for both the web and phone to see what kind of differences there are between the two. Except for the inability to use the ChildWindow I was able to build out controls and share them between the two applications. The main differences were in the MainPage.xaml that is created, along with the default styles, when you create a new Silverlight application for the web and Windows Phone 7. Of course,

I decided to create a game (called ShapeAttack) to see how it would perform on the phone emulator. Sad to say the performance on the emulator is very poor but I would imagine that it would be better on the physical device but as I do not own a Windows Phone 7 yet the emulator has to do for now. For that reason I would recommend doing this parallel type of development so you can actually test your application.

What I did was create all of the game code in UserControls, including the main game surface, then I linked the files from the standard Silverlight project into the phone project.

The game is very simple and kind of cheesy :D, just click on the shapes to destroy them. And of course you can download the source code for ShapeAttack(2.8MB) or play ShapeAttack online.

Frank LaVigne has posted a very useful tool to download all of the MIX 10 session content.