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Code52, social coding and DVCS

Back in january (2012) I read a blogpost by Scott Hanselman about getting involved in open-source. He wrote about a new “group” called Code52, which did a new coding project each week. It sounded interesting, so I looked into it.

imageEver since, I have been following along Code52’s projects via their Jabbr channel and on Github. Eventhough I haven’t had the time to participate yet, it’s really motivating to see how people collaborate and make things happen.
As a developer you can really learn ALOT from collaborating with other developers and this part really excites me about this whole project. That’s why I have on my todo-list to participate in at least one Code52 project in 2012.

The first thing learned (and I didn’t even actively participated in a project – I were just observing) by following along Code52 were Github and how it enables developers to collaborate.
Later I found out that it wasn’t really specific to Github, but more the DVCS (Git), which Github depends upon. With Git (and Mercurial for that matter) you can “Fork” a repository, so you have your own copy of it, then you make some changes and the do a “Pull request” (kind of a patch) to the owner of the repository you forked.
This might sound complicated, and frankly, this and other stuff about Git IS hard to wrap your head around at first, but when you do (and I don’t even understand it all yet – far from) you start to see the power of this and the awsomeness of DVCS.

I have spend quite some time trying to understand Git and DVCS, and here are some helpfull links.
Read here to understand how Git works: http://think-like-a-git.net/
This is a great Windows client for using Git: http://code.google.com/p/gitextensions/
Another cool Windows client for Git: http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/

The best way to learn is to play around with it, so create an account on Github and do as I did, create a repository that you can play around with – I called my “GitPlayground”.

You can find me on Github under the name Laumania. Feel free to follow me, or maybe fork my WeAreBugs-XNA repository and implement some of the missing features Smile

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XNA port of “We Are Bugs”

Some weeks ago I came by Jeff Webers (aka Farseer Games) small game “We Are Bugs“. I thought about if this game could be easially ported from browser Silverlight to a Windows Phone app in Silverlight.

It turned out that it was VERY easy to do actually.

Next up I wanted to challenge myself a little, so I set the goal to port “We Are Bugs” to XNA too.

This part was actually also surprisingly easy and lucky for you – I put that whole thing on Github (as I’m also playing around with Github these days).

So go grab the source from Github and see how a Silverlight game could look in XNA.

 

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WindowsPhoneFan.dk – a site for WP7 users in Denmark

I have been hooked in Windows Phone from the first time I saw it. I have a LG Optimus 7 now, which I bought for about a year ago. This phone has been my primary phone (only phone) for the last year – and I still like it :)

In the summer I started searching for a danish site about Windows Phone. Apparently there wasn’t any community/news site for Windows Phone users in Denmark.

So, I started it :)

In June I started a new danish community site – WindowsPhoneFan.dk

Eventhough the site is relatively new and Windows Phone isn’t that know in Denmark these days, WindowsPhoneFan.dk is seeing greatly increasing trafic week by week.  It’s amazing!

It’s always cool when people are liking what you do, and apparently 4-500 people like the site so much that they visit it everyday – so I’m happy.

Hopefully more people will join as Windows Phone gets more known in Denmark, as right now, it’s mostly the nerds knowing about it. :)