This past Saturday was the Tampa Code Camp, and it was a fantastic event. I had high hopes going in for my session on using MonoGame to create a Windows 8 Store game, but sometimes things don’t go as planned. I was using a laptop I haven’t used before for presentations and didn’t realize I would need a HDMI to VGA adapter. Sessions were only 50 minutes long and I lost almost 20 minutes getting set up so there wasn’t much time left. So stuff happens but the mishaps of the day may turn out to be a good thing, since I plan on doing the following to make up for it. First of all, here are the slides, demo script, and source code for the presentation:

http://www.billreiss.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/MonoGameWin8.zip

I really like this presentation, and since I didn’t get to present it properly I also plan on doing a series of blog posts detailing the steps in the presentation and also a screen recording of what the presentation was supposed to be.

Along with pointing out where Microsoft could do better, I’ll also highlight the good things they are doing to try to drum up developer interest in Windows 8. Microsoft is doing a great promotion where the first 2000 apps submitted to the Windows 8 Store and entered through the Generation App site will receive a Samsung Series 7 Slate (tablet). This is very similar to the giveaway at the BUILD conference last year, and contains an i5 processor which gives you enough power where you could plug a keyboard and a mouse in and actually do development work on it, and they typically cost over $1000 so it’s a nice prize.

For some reason it seems like it’s hard to actually find links to this promotion but you can get there through this link:

http://www.generationapp.com/giveaway

This promotion is unfortunately only for US residents, I know there are a lot of complaints every time this happens and I wish Microsoft could figure out a way to do more global promotions. I assume it has to do with tax laws and country by country rules about contests, but I think the benefit of figuring something out when it comes to this would outweigh any of the extra effort.

So you better hurry, these may be gone quickly.