A few things I’ve worked on or written have gone up in the past couple of months, so here’s a quick list of what they are and where you can get them:

Kinect Service v1.6

The Coding4Fun Kinect Service allows you to stream Kinect color, depth, skeleton, and audio from one PC to another PC or a Windows Phone via sockets. This new release now includes Windows Runtime Components written in C++ which target x86, x64 and ARM. Now you can stream Kinect data to a Windows Store app!

• CodePlex Project

Maelstrom

For //build/ 2012, us Coding4Fun folks wanted to showcase what Windows 8 can offer developers. There are a lot of projects showing off great things like contracts and Live Tiles, but we wanted to show off some of the lesser known features. This project focuses on one of those: stereoscopic 3D with DirectX 11.1. Imagine ridiculously over-engineered 3D pong, and that’s Maelstrom!

If you're writing (or plan to write) a Windows Store app, check out our Windows Store App snippets project!  In partnership with the Visual Studio team, we have created a collection of around 60 IntelliSense Code Snippets for common Windows Store app programming tasks. The snippets are available for Visual Basic, C#, C++, and JavaScript developers.

For more details, please see:

• Installation
• List of Snippets

With the Windows Store now open for submissions, use these snippets to get a jump start on your project.

After installing, just right-click and select Insert Snippet, and select the snippet from the list. Then press Tab to jump between fields.  Here's an example:

Give them a try and let us know what you think!

Warning: This is a pretty off-topic post about pinball, but maybe it’ll help someone searching for the information.

Backstory: My dad was a coin-op operator. I’m the son of a coin-op operator. As you might imagine, I have a just a tiny bit of love for video games and pinballs. When my dad passed away in 2008, I decided to keep my favorite pins from the route: Funhouse, Addams Family, Theatre of Magic, Tales of the Arabian Nights, and Revenge from Mars.

After sitting in storage for a couple of years, the software update sitting on Revenge from Mars would no longer checksum properly. The game was running fine, but obviously something was wrong. After lots of other work on the machine, it was time to update the firmware again to version 1.5.

Finding the software and ROM images was easy. Everything is available at PlanetaryPinball.com. Anyone can just grab the Pinball 2000 Update Manager and the appropriate software update for the machine to be updated. However, trying to install and run the Pinball 2000 Update Manager was a different story. The installer choked when running on my Windows 7 x64 machine. Not surprising since this application and installer was written 13 years ago. Luckily, I was able to install the app in a Windows XP x86 virtual machine and copy the installed files over to my laptop.

I will be presenting a session at Visual Studio Live! in New York this August 6-10 hosted on the Microsoft Campus.  The conference is a full 5 day event and there’s still time to register!

T13 - Writing Asynchronous Code Using .NET 4.5 and C# 5.0
Date: Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Time: 2:30 PM – 3:45 PM 
Level: Introductory

A variety of new features were added to the .NET 4.5 Framework, including support for easily writing asynchronous code. This session will introduce the concepts of asynchronous programming, .NET Tasks, how to ensure your UI remains responsive, and how to do all of this properly in your own applications using the new async and await keywords. If you’re looking for ways to provide a better, smoother experience for your users, don’t miss this session!

Get more information on the conference at:

• VSLive! Website
• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn

Hope to see you all there!

I'm off to TechEd North America later this week where we'll be showing off the Project Detroit car and our BoxingBots project previously demonstrated at SXSW in March. 

Dan Fernandez and I will also be giving a talk on Kinect goodness.  Here are the details:

Coding4Fun: Build Fun, Cool, Commercial Applications Using the Kinect for Windows SDK

Session Code: DEV330
Speaker(s): Brian Peek, Dan Fernandez
Tuesday, June 12 at 5:00 PM - 6:15 PM in S320A

Come to this must-see session to find out how you can use the Kinect for Windows SDK to build commercial applications! Learn how the RGB and depth cameras work, how to use and fine-tune skeletal tracking, how to read an audio stream from the Kinect microphone array and even how to send Kinect data over the network including to your Windows Phone