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This is the much-awaited sequel to Boss Launch, titled "Boss Launch 2: Zombie Attack" - in which you use your (normally useless) boss to take out a Zombie horde as you progress through many challenging levels. Things get interesting when you interact with vehicles (such as jumping into the back of a truck).

In this walkthrough, we will create a table shuffleboard style game for Windows Phone 7 using Silverlight. Many bars feature these long wooden table games, in which players slide metal pucks down the length of the table, attempting to get as close as possible to the far end without sliding off the edge.

In order to publish a Windows Phone 7 application on the Marketplace, your app must pass a list of certification requirements. One of the items in the Windows Phone 7 Certification Requirements caught my eye:

5.2.4 Use of Back Button in Games

a.Pressing the Back button from the first screen of a game must exit the application.

b. During gameplay, pressing the Back button in games must present an in-game menu. This menu must offer the option to resume the game. Pressing the Back button while this menu is up must exit the game. Microsoft recommends that you save the user game state or warn them of possible progress loss before exiting the game).

c. Outside gameplay (for example, when the user is viewing the options or help menu), pressing the Back button must return to the previous menu or page.

This Shuffleboard game was created as the basis for a Coding4Fun tutorial, which will be available soon on the C4F Website. I don't want to spoil the fun for the official tutorial release so I won't go into much detail here, but this demo should be helpful for folks wanting to quickly create physics based games for the upcoming Windows Phone 7 devices.

You might be aware that when you publish a Silverlight XAP on the web, your source code is very vulnerable to prying eyes. A XAP file is in a ZIP compressed format, and the contents are .NET Assemblies and resources which can be disassembled easily using a tool like .NET Reflector .

In this session, we talked about the new hardware, Silverlight support, the Emulator, GPU Acceleration, monitoring performance, Behaviors, sound support, input, and monetization of your games.

WP7 devices have a separate GPU which is optimized for handling graphics operations such as displaying, scaling, rotating, and 3D. Silverlight on WP7 has the ability to use that GPU, which can greatly increase graphics performance. It does this by allowing a “snapshot” of a visual, called a Bitmap Cache, to be handed over to the GPU for manipulation.

Andy Beaulieu will explain you how to use TransformToVisual for custom XAML animation.

I recently had the need to dynamically draw a shape in XAML from a specific X,Y offset within another control. This is straightforward... unless the control is Rotated, Scaled, or otherwise transformed. Since the original X,Y position is no longer in the same spot after a transform, we need to use some method to calculate the new X,Y position within the control.