My Tech Evangelist colleagues, Joe Raio and Brian Sherwin, have create a great set of video tutorials on how to create your own website using Azure. This is part of Microsoft’s Choose to Code campaign, which guides your middle and high school students through a series of online tutorials walking them through the process of creating and publishing their own website. If you are using Azure Passes, watch this video If you are using DreamSpark, start with this video Course Setup and Azure Activation Building your very first web page with HTML using Visual Studio Online! Let’s learn how to add some style to your page with CSS Make your website mobile friendly using Bootstrap Making your website interactive using JavaScript Learn how to use jQuery to send and receive data Still need Azure? Reach out to me to inquire about BizSpark

If you find some links that you think would be useful, feel free to share! You can always subscribe (or unsubscribe) by clicking on the MailChimp widget on the right-hand side of this page. Here’s a link to the original file. Gaming The Flame In The Flood – Adventure game on Kickstarter Here’s Why We Need Video Games In Every Classroom “How Long To Beat” -> useful site that tells you how long it takes to beat a game Game Dev Reverse engineering Yoda Stories VC / Startups The unexpected and uneven evolution of the startup fundraising market What is the definition of a seed round or an A round? A Couple Of Good Books For Entrepreneurs Seed Round Pricing (Actual data warning!) The Coming Meltdown in College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Any Time Soon 25 Angel Investors in New York You Need to Know From board games to beer-making machines: Take a look at the Seattle startup scene Nerdy / Tech 100 Technical Things Non-Technical People Can Learn To Make Their Lives Easier HTML5 PhoneGap Day US 2014, in San Francisco Apache Cordova 4 released

RESOURCES: You can find the source for this project on my GitHub. Power point slides Video Walkthrough Get this working on Windows Phone In part 2 of my tutorial, I showed you how you how to set up the initial project with prime[31]. Now that we have it built, I’m going to walk you through the code, as well as how it all works. Insert Let’s test this out by running the project from Visual Studi and inserting a new object into our leaderboard. Deploy the sample, connect to the Azure service, then insert a new username and score. ...

I was at Unity’s Unite conference in Seattle this week, and I learned from their education team that Unity has far cheaper licensing for students, faculty, and schools. In partnership with Studica, Unity has discounted costs. Here’s a link to the page. Also, Autodesk, creators of Maya, 3DS Max, etc., also have FREE versions of their tools for students. Where was this when I was in school, learning Blender? I’m turning back the clock a few years and headed back to my SUNY Oneonta days, so that I can grab some of this stuff. ...

I’m still at Unite 2014 this week, so I thought I’d deliver a quick recap of the Unite 2014 keynote, courtesy of Jaime Rodriguez, of Microsoft. Here was my favorite talk of Unite as well: [Unite 2014 – IL2CPP: The next generation of scripting in Unity](Unite%202014 - IL2CPP: The next generation of scripting in Unity) Unite 2014 – WebGL Deployment in Unity 5 Opening stats: [David Helgason, CEO] 600k active montly game developers .. [compared to 120k users, 3 years ago] 54% of games use middleware [compared to 10% 4 years ago] 47% mobile developers use Unity [17% in 2009] 8.7B Unity mobile app installs [not all inclusive, that is people who opt-in to analytics] PC has strength [mobile devs targeting PCs as they get better] Industry: [David Helgason, CEO] ...

Jennifer Marsman wrote a great post on her MSDN blog about the benefits of BizSpark and how to get started with the program. This step-by-step tutorial can help get you enrolled as well. Perks of the program: http://wootstudio.ca/startups/bizspark.aspx Windows 10 developer accounts (Xbox, Windows) Visual Studio Ultimate licenses Windows licenses (multiple versions) Office 365 developer account $150 / month Azure credits (for each dev on your team, up to 5 total, $750 value) Website hosting, virtual machines, databases, & mobile services Visual Studio Online (Formerly TFS) 90 Days of pluralsight + DigitalTutors training Free marketing support with Microsoft Who qualifies? Actively engaged in development of a software-based app, product, or service that will form a core piece of your current or intended business. (NOTE: you must be building a product! Startups providing consulting services are not eligible.) Your company is privately held, and in business for less than 5 years. Makes less than US $1 million in annual revenue Whether you are a student, startup, or an indie game developer, Microsoft views you as a welcome addition to our startup program. ...

HTML5 Free Udacity course: WebGL and Three.js Microsoft will join Khronos and will participate in the webGL working group The power of WebGL – Assasin’s Creed Pirates, using BabylonJS Gaming / Game Dev Night Trap Revamped Kickstarter How to get your game covered by YouTubers – Gamaasutra Xamarin’s new 2D C# crossplatform gaming framework Universal Apps in Unity – Unity Blog Marketing tips from devs who have over 3 million downloads – MSDN How to reach the press as a game dev – John Polson John Romero is making another shooter – Joystiq The js13kGames HTML5 and JavaScript Game Development Competition Has Begun Dan Adelman’s advice for indies Why I’ve said goodbye to mobile, in favor of PC – Gamasutra Tech ...

RESOURCES: You can find the source for this project on my GitHub. In part 1 of my tutorial, I showed you how you how to set up the initial project with prime[31]. Now that we have it built, I’m going to walk you through the code, as well as how it all works. Now that we have the project built, let’s open it up the metro folder, and launch the Prime31 Visual Studio solution. ...

I’m an avid runner and cyclist, but I can’t stand exercising in silence. Sure, I have tons of nerdy video game music (woohoo, Yuzo Koshiro), but sometimes I also want to learn. I peruse YouTube for different things to learn every day, and generally listen in the background as I work. I find that tech talks from user groups are the best. (Check out this video from David Catuhe, on how to write WebGL games with Babylon.js) ...