Month: February 2017

Today is a big day for Team Xbox as we celebrate the worldwide launch of early access for Halo Wars 2. Since the launch of the original Halo Wars on Xbox 360 eight years ago, the passionate Halo community has been urging us to publish a sequel. I am incredibly proud of the action-packed experience the talented teams at 343 Industries and Creative Assembly have created on the biggest Halo battlefield ever. From the in-depth, story-driven single-player campaign to the innovative and accessible Blitz mode, to the more traditional Deathmatch, Halo Wars 2 is designed for players of all skill… Continue reading Celebrating an Epic Xbox 2017 Games Lineup→

In this latest edition of Weekend Reading we have a lot to report, including news on the RSA Conference, an open source set of tools to help researchers and developers train and test drones and other gadgets, and how technology is transforming golf. This year’s RSA Conference in San Francisco brought the world’s security professionals together to discuss cybersecurity at a critical time, writes Microsoft President Brad Smith. Just as … Read more »

The post Making drones safer, teeing off with high-tech golf and proposing a Digital Geneva Convention — Weekend Reading: Feb. 17 edition appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Continue reading Making drones safer, teeing off with high-tech golf and proposing a Digital Geneva Convention — Weekend Reading: Feb. 17 edition→

Suit up, Spartans. Early access to Halo Wars 2 is available today for players who purchased Halo Wars 2 Ultimate Edition! Last night, 343 Industries and Creative Assembly celebrated Halo Wars 2 with the community via a special livestream event hosted at 343 Industries, which included exclusive interviews, gameplay hands-on and prize giveaways. 343 Industries also shed new light on what fans can expect with the Season Pass, including new content available every third Wednesday, new campaign missions in Operation: Spearbreaker and a new leader named Kinsano. Future multiplayer maps will also be available for free to all players, regardless… Continue reading Halo Wars 2 Early Access Available Now→

Daniel Wertheim shares a cool little(?) project that mashes together a number of components, services and technologies…

Visualising my heart rate on stage using a Hue lamp and a heart rate sensor and .NET

“This week I held a talk at Swetugg, a two day Swedish conference for .NET developers. My title was: “NATS, what a beautiful message protocol!“. In order to show a good use-case of NATS I put together a small demo where I read my heart rate in real time using a sensor and ANT+ SDK, which was published via NATS. I then had two different services (apps) running. Both subscribed to the NATS subject to which the heart rate readings were published. One service wrote the data to InfluxDB so that it could be visualised in Grafana. In another subscriber I took the data and matched it to a certain colour and then used the HTTP-API of the Philips Hue bridge to make a Philips Hue Go indicate if I was “calm” or “stressed”.

…

The overall solution

I put together a small sketch to give a quick overview of how the pieces worked together

Some Docker containers…

The “message” HeartRateReceived…

ANT+ SDK…

The Indexer…

…

The HueController

The last piece was a service/app that got a copy of the published message and updated the colour of the lamp. If you are interested, you can get more information about the API of the Philps Hue bridge: https://www.developers.meethue.com/documentation/getting-started

…

This demo worked well for me. And shows a very good use-case for NATS. Pumping frequent, small sized sensor data, where transactional guarantees is not needed and “at most once” delivery is OK.

That’s it. Hope it can inspire you to build something as well.”

[Click through for the whole thing]

Follow @CH9
Follow @coding4fun
Follow @gduncan411

Continue reading Have a Little Heart (Rate Sensor)→

Karthik Bharathy joins Scott Hanselman to talk about extending the capability of PowerApps using Custom APIs. In this session, we will use PowerApps with Microsoft Cognitive Services API, a custom Image Upload API and the Camera control to build a cros… Continue reading Extensibility in PowerApps | Azure Friday→

Visual Studio Mobile Center powers end-to-end mobile app development experiences. Adrian Hall joins Scott Hanselman to showcase how to work with his TODO app data in the cloud with Visual Studio Mobile Center’s Tables feature. Check out the other Mobile Center (http://mobile.azure.com) features including Build, Test, Distribute, Identity, Crashes, and Analytics.

Continue reading Connecting to the Cloud with Visual Studio Mobile Center | Azure Friday→

This week, we chat with Beth Massi about .NET’s 15th anniversary.Beth’s anniversary post: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/02/13/happy-15th-birthday-net/The Twitter anniversary feed: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23MyVSStory Continue reading Beth Massi – Happy Anniversary, .NET! | On .NET→

Cities: Skylines was released as a modern take on a classic city builder back in March of 2015. The game became a massive hit, featuring residential, commercial, industrial and office areas zoned around tight road-building tools (with various city services and unique buildings sprinkled in). Skylines can be played as a progression oriented experience where more building types, services and public transportation options are unlocked as your city grows, or it can be played as a sandbox experience where the player can elect to have everything available from the beginning, even with infinite money if their sole desire is to… Continue reading Build Your Dream City in Cities: Skylines on Xbox One This Spring→