Simon Squared – We have Multi-player: Days 4, 5 and (ahem!) 6

OK. So you let me have one more day, and I took 3. But I got it working. After 6 days of work, I can show you Simon Squared in all its Windows Azure powered multi-player glory:

Simon Squared Multi-player, nicely showcasing my Multiple-instances-of-the-WP7-emulator hack

So what took me so long? Surely after getting the Windows Phone 7 emulator to talk to the Windows Azure emulator, finding a UI library for XNA and enabling multiple instances of the WP7 emulator to run at once, everything else should have been easy? If only!

Here’s what happened.

Day 4

9:00 Start by setting up a Windows Azure subscription, making use of my MSDN subscription benefits: it's pretty generous: 750 hours/month of Compute Time, 10 GB storage, 7/14 GB traffic in/out.

I get a little worried when the sign up screen tells me that I'll receive an activation email "within 24 hours" - but I'm relieved to see that within a couple of minutes of being redirected to the Azure management console (very swish Silverlight app) my subscription appears, and I can start creating deployments.

10:11 Got side-tracked into a discussion with my boss about possibilities for future products and offerings based on the work we've been doing here

12:45 Implemented the phone side behaviour for running the count down to the games beginning. Making heavy use of the Reactive Framework (which comes built into WP7) for hiding away the messiness of asynchronous calls.

13:45 Problem with WCF REST: if I return a derived type of message from my operation, the client only receives the properties defined on the base type. This is the problem that the KnownType attribute solves elsewhere in WCF, but it doesn’t seem to be working for WCF REST.

15:22 Discovered that WCF REST uses XmlSerializer by default rather than DataContractSerializer - so KnownTypes woudn't work. Also discovered that RestSharp is using XmlSerializer when sending data to the server, so not serializing inherited types in the way that DCS is expecting.

15:39 Now got inherited message types passing correctly: WCF Rest and RestSharp are both pretty pluggable, so I was able to implement a custom ISerializer in RestSharp, and a custom MediaTypeProcessor in WCF Rest, both using DataContractSerializer instead of XmlSerializer

17:30 Caught out by Http response caching. The symptom was that I’d launch a fresh HttpWebRequest,  but get back stale data. Investigation showed that the requests weren’t ever leaving the phone – it never showed up in Fiddler. I spent ages prodding my Reactive Framework query, convinced that it wasn’t issuing the requests properly. Then I remembered Http Caching. In my haste, and newbie-ness, I solved the problem by putting a NoCache on all the responses on the server side. A better way would probably have been to set the WebRequest.CachePolicy.

Day 5

09:00 Thought occurs to me that I might get on faster if I don't have to keep waiting for the Azure Emulator to start up and shut down every time I build my server. Why not just run my server project directly in IIS? I try it – and WCF Http stops working. I eventually discover that the CTP bits I’m using don’t yet support HTTPS, and I had a HTTPs binding configured on my default Website in IIS.

10:30 Fortunately Cassini works - why did it take me an hour and half to discover that!

10:43 Start work on refactoring puzzle generation, so I can do it on the server side. The goal is that the server will generate rounds of 5 puzzles, and send them out to all the players in advance. Within a round, the server will send out a message saying “start puzzle X at Time T” – and thus synchronize the experience of each of the players

12:00 Working on updating the Phone side to play the puzzles that server sends out.

13:16 Finished refactoring the Game screen so that it is backed by a GameController - allowing me to implement a SinglePlayerGameController and MultiPlayerGameController.

17:20 Got some simple state machines working on the client and server. It looks something like this:

17:40 With two instances of the emulator running, I can now see the same puzzles displayed on each. The problem is, they’re horribly out of sync – player 1 might get the puzzle two seconds ahead of player 2, which for small puzzles means he’s certain to win!

Day 6

09:21 Implemented Christian’s algorithm to estimate the clock skew between server and phone. The implementation is pretty straight-forward using the Reactive Framework, and quite elegant, if I do say so myself. Remind me to show you, sometime.

10:33 Couldn’t figure out why changes I was making in the code weren’t having any effect when I ran the game. Then discovered that Visual Studio had some how set itself to “Never Build on Run”.

12:00 It’s working! Multiple players now receive the puzzles beautifully in sync, one after another. As soon as one player completes a puzzle, it vanishes from all the other players screens, and the count-down to the next puzzle begins

13:20 Implemented a scoreboard to show the position at the end of each round

14:30 Having deployed the game to my phone, I challenge Vinod to a dual – me on the emulator, him on the phone. I now discover a serious downside to being a games developer: once a game reaches playability, you inevitably get sucked into playing when you should just be testing.

15:35 Use Expression Design 4 to recreate a game logo that Neil designed using Word. What do you think?

17:05 Spitting and polishing. Tidying up the various screens. I might not have time to make them pretty, but at least I can make the buttons big enough to touch. That’s the downside of testing with an emulator using a mouse – it doesn’t alert you to the imprecision of fat fingers!

17:30 Waiting for Windows Azure to deploy the server. Visual Studio 2010 is supposed to be able to package and deploy your project straight into the cloud, but I couldn’t get that to work (something about it not being able to resolve the URL of my storage account). Instead, I uploaded the package manually.

17:45 Still waiting for Windows Azure to start up my role instance. Give up and go home.

21:00 Wife gives me permission to interrupt our traditional Thursday evening film (The Prestige last night, – recommended) to see whether the Azure role has started up yet. It hasn’t, so in the time-honoured way I tell it to reboot – and that fixes it. A few minutes later, she’s thrashing me – mainly because she’s using the phone, and I’m using the emulator over Remote Desktop (my laptop is old, and doesn’t support XNA games in the emulator) – in that setup the emulator doesn’t respond to my mouse moves!

What I need is another phone.

Ah, what’s this I see – the Windows Phone Marketplace Developer Newsletter, announcing Windows Phone 7 Handsets for Developers. The Newsletter says that local evangelists have codes for free phones to give away. I think Mike Ormond is the WP7 evangelist for the UK …

Multi-player enabling my Windows Phone 7 game: Day 3 – The Server Side

I’m building a game to enter in Red Gate’s Windows Phone 7 App competition. I built the core of the game in 3 days from a standing start. Now I’ve challenged myself to make the game multi-player in 3 days, using Windows Azure for the server side.  Day 1 was spent getting up to speed with Windows Azure and networking on WP7. On Day 2 I got the UI sketched out. Here’s Day 3:

8:30 Begin the day with excellent news. With barely any badgering at all Red Badger have kindly offered me an non-expiring build of their XPF UI library for XNA. Thanks chaps!

And thanks to everyone who's shown support by tweeting the last couple of blog posts. I can't tell you how motivating it is as I set to work again this morning.

8:45 Microsoft have released the January 2011 Update to the Windows Phone Developer Tools (on the 4th of February mind, but I'll let that pass). This is the one that brings the promised Copy-Paste support and some performance updates. Being the good boy I am, I install it before beginning anything else.

9:32 Staring work on the server. I've never designed anything RESTful before, so I've taken a quick look at a couple of articles: one at quite a high level, and one in a little more detail.  A logical place to begin is starting a game. So what I think I need to do is define a /Game resource on my server, and make it respond to POST requests.

11:45 Hooked up AutoFac on the server so that I can inject dependencies into my REST services.

12:00 A good chunk of the day gone, and I still haven't implemented starting a game. WCF isn't playing nice at the moment: I can't get it to respond to the POST request I'm making to my Service.

12:01 Writing the above fixed the problem! Well, not quite. As soon as I had written that, I thought of fiddling with the UriTemplate on the WebInvoke attribute. Since I was posting a request to the /Games resource, and I had registered my Games service using routes.AddServiceRoute<GamesService>("Games", serviceConfiguration) I thought I could get away without specifying a value for UriTemplate on WebInvoke. Turned out I needed to specify "/"!

12:05 Next: list all available games, so that a player can choose one to join.

12:45 Done! I can now create several games through the Start a Game screen, and see them all listed on the Join a Game screen.

16:15 The afternoon passes in a blur. I’ve added several operations to my service, so that the basic game setup screens are working. This is what I’ve got on the server side:

Resource	Http Method	Meaning
/Games	POST	Start a Game
/Games	GET	List existing games
/Games/{id}/Players	POST	Join a game
/Games/{id}/Players	GET	List players belonging to a game

Notice any conspicuous absences? That’s right: there are no operations to support actually playing a game. Where has the time gone? But before I can move on, I should at least check that this service works if multiple devices connect to it.

16:25 Fustrated: the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 emulator is single-instance. How can I test a multi-player game if I can only run one copy of it?! I’ve got to find a way round this.

17:30 Eureka! After a journey deep into the bowels of the Microsoft.SmartDevice.Connectivity API and its associated XML datastore I’ve found a way to have multiple instances of the emulator running at once, and even debug them simultaneously.

Hey! Hang on just a minute: there’s already a post on my blog about that – is someone with a time machine playing around with me here?

But never mind that. My 3 days are up, and all I’ve got to show for it are the game sign-up screens. So where do we go from here? Well, I’m going to make my excuses and plead for an extra day – just one more day, and I’m sure I can get it working!

My excuses:

• It took me ages to get the Windows Phone 7 emulator talking to the Windows Azure emulator: the good folks at Microsoft haven’t connected the dots here.
• A good two hours or more of my first day was taken up with the hunt for a working UI library for XNA. Thanks to Red Badger for saving me further frustrating hours.
• Running multiple instances of the emulator really shouldn’t be that hard.

So what do you think? Can I have another day?

How to deploy to, and debug, multiple instances of the Windows Phone 7 emulator

I’m developing a multi-player Windows Phone 7 game. Now I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to test a multi-player application when I’m only allowed to run one instance of it. And that seemed to be the case with Windows Phone 7 applications. Microsoft provide an Emulator, but it’s a single-instance application: however many times you click its icon, you only get the one window.

Googling found me a useful article on how to run multiple instances of the emulator. But it didn’t tell me how to deploy applications to them, or how to debug those applications. There was however, a post in the forums, somewhat reminiscent of Monsieur de Fermat scribbling's, that gave me hope that what I wanted to do was indeed possible.

So I set out on a journey of discovery.

About an hour later, I had this,this, and this

Step by Step instructions

Disclaimer: what I am about to show is completely unsupported by Microsoft or me. Continue at your own risk. Here be dragons.

1. Open the folder [Your Drive Letter]:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Phone Tools\CoreCon\10.0\addons
2. Locate the file ImageConfig.en-US.xsl
3. Take a copy of it, leaving it in the same directory, and name it something like ImageConfig.en-US 2nd Instance.xsl
4. Open the copy in your text editor of choice.
5. Locate the element DEVICE
6. Change the Name attribute, and assign a new value to ID – you can use the Online Guid Generator if you can’t think of one off the top of your head.
7. Scroll down the file to locate the part that says PROPERTY ID=”VMID”:
8. Put a new Guid inside that element – make sure though that you use capital letters rather than lower case.
9. Save the file
10. That’s it. Re open the XAP deployment tool, or Visual Studio, if you already have them open, and you’ll see your new Emulator instances.

A Bonus Visual Studio tip

To debug multiple instances of your Windows Phone 7 application you can do the following:

1. Start the first instance as usual.
2. Change the Deployment Device to your newly-minted 2nd Emulator:
3. To start the 2nd instance, right-click on your project, go to the Debug menu item, then select Start new instance:

4. Prepare a wet towel and a darkened room in preparation for the multi-player debugging experience.

Multiplayer-enabling my Windows Phone 7 game: Day 2–Building a UI with XPF

I’m building a game to enter in Red Gate’s Windows Phone 7 App competition. The first challenge I set myself was to build the core of the game in 3 days from a standing start. Then Red Gate moved the goal posts. So I’ve set myself a new challenge: make the game multi-player in 3 days, using Windows Azure for the server side.  Day 1, was spent getting up to speed with Windows Azure and networking on WP7. Here’s Day 2:

9:00 Decided to take the plunge and go with Red Badger's XPF framework for the UI - what else can I do, if I want to get this thing done in three days? I’m going to need TextBoxes, ListBoxes and the like, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to write them from scratch in the time I have. On Red Badger’s roadmap, there’s no word on a likely release date. I wonder if I can badger them into at least giving me a build that won’t expire before the competition gets judged?

9:43 Got my first "Hello World" screen working using XPF. For ages I couldn't get buttons to respond to clicks, until I noticed from a sample that I needed to supply an InputManager instance to the RootElement.

10:47 Created a TextBox control using XPF. They've done a good job of mimicking the Silverlight API. And in some ways, their DependencyProperty implementation is even better! It uses generics for a start. And the key classes are actually called ReactiveProperty and ReactiveObject because their change notification is based on IObservable from the Rx Framework (which, by the way, comes in the box on WP7). Text input on XNA is pretty limited. Your only option is to call Guide.BeginShowKeyboardInput, which is an async method that takes care of showing the soft keyboard as well as the editor, and then returns to you the text that was entered.

11:40 Refactored my game so it now has Screen classes to represent the states that it can be in - Showing the Game, Showing the Welcome Screen, Showing Help, etc. It’s nice that XNA has the concept of Components and Services built in.

14:21Got a simple dialog working:

14:36 Borrowed the Messenger code from Laurent Bugnion's MVVM Light Toolkit to enable me to pass messages in a loosely coupled way between my screens.

15:06 Seeing strange behaviour in XPF where clicks on a button seem to be handled twice: once by the button, and then by widgets on the following screen (which is made visible by the button click). Realise that this is what comes of changing one screen for another in the middle of handling events. I'm going to have to implement a mini message queue so I can queue the change of screen after the button event has been handled.

15:15 Implemented the message queue, and magically another bug goes away too! That bug was most odd – after I clicked one button, moved to a different screen, then moved back again, all the other buttons would stop working. It turned out that the first button was capturing the mouse events, so the other buttons didn’t get a look in. Making sure that events completed before changing screens obviously fixed the mouse capture problem too.

16:05 Dialogs are coming on nicely now, but it sure is tedious building up a control hierarchy in C#. Oh XAML, how I miss you!

17:21 Got a very basic ListBox working on top of XPF. The time I’ve spent delving around in WPF and Silverlight certainly helps out here!

17:30 I think that’s enough of the multi-player UI done for now. That leaves me with one day to implement the multi-player logic, and the server.

Do you think I can do it?

Multiplayer-enabling my Windows Phone 7 game: Day 1

I’m building a game to enter in Red Gate’s Windows Phone 7 App competition. The first challenge I set myself was to build the core of the game in 3 days from a standing start. Then Red Gate moved the goal posts. So I’ve set myself a new challenge: make the game multi-player in 3 days, using Windows Azure for the server side. Here’s Day 1:

9:00 Started researching networking capabilities in WP7. MSDN has a useful summary. In short, HttpWebRequest and WebClient are supported, as are parts of WCF. One notable absence are Duplex Services – so it looks like I’ll be doing my own client side polling. ChannelFactory.CreateChannel is not supported, so service proxies cannot be generated dynamically - they have to be created using Add Service Reference, or slsvcutil on the command line. Since I’m not a great fan of all the boilerplate that the Add Service wizard spits out, I think I’ll give WCF on the client side a miss. This gives me the idea of creating a RESTful service that I can call using plain old HttpWebRequests.

9:16 Given the recent hoo-ha  over Windows Phone 7 data leaks, I think I should do my bit to save bytes and minimise data usage. I'Since I’m quite keen on Google’s Protocol Buffers format, I’m pleased to discovered that ProtoBuf.Net, Marc Gravell's implementation of the Google Protocol Buffers format supports WP7.

9:22 Starting work on a Windows Azure project for testing communication between client and server. It’s neat how the Cloud project in VS 2010 has a Windows Azure emulator.

10:38 Downloaded and built Microsoft's WCF Web APIs Preview 3. This extends the REST support that WCF has, as of .Net 4.0. Using this, and helpful blog post from Jesus Rodriguez, got a test service sending back responses using Protocol buffers. One thing that caught me out was failing to decorate my data contract classes with the [ProtoContract] and [ProtoMember] attributes. The serializer just returned an empty stream without that. Now to get the phone talking to the server.

11:05 An interruption: the boss arrives back in the office with an HTC HD7 for me to test the game on!

Signed up for a developer account to allow the phone to be unlocked for testing my apps. To my dismay, I discovered that I can't unlock the phone for deploying test apps until the publisher verification process has been completed. What?! I can understand why Microsoft would want to check that our company is who it claims it is before it lets us submit Apps to the market place; but to my own phone? I think I know who I am!

11:39 Encountered my first real problem: Windows Azure compute emulator only listens on the loopback address, 127.0.0.1; this means that the Windows Phone 7 emulator can't talk to it. Seems I’m not the first to have encountered this. I tried a number of solutions:

• Using NCat, a Port fowarding tool. No joy with this at all.
• TcpTrace, another kind of port forwarding tool, worked, but not when Fiddler was listening in.

13:00 Thanks to some suggestions from Phil Haack I discovered that Fiddler will do the job on its own (is there anything it can’t do?). Following these instructions, I set up Fiddler as a reverse proxy. This means my WP7 app can connect to MyMachine:8888, and Fiddler will shuttle the traffic to and from the Azure emulator.

13:10 Discovered RestSharp, a library that builds on top of HttpWebRequest to simplify making calls to RESTful services. In particular, it can deserialize the Response bytes into objects for you.

13:17 Trying to write a ProtoBuf deserializer for RestSharp, but Protobuf is throwing  MissingMethodException. It looks like I might have to use pre-built Serialization assemblies

14:40: Following Mark Gravell's post on using Protobuf-net with WP7, I mange to get deserialization of messages working on WP7 by pre-building a serialization assembly. I have to resort to subterfuge to get the resulting Serializer assembly added to my WP7 project: The Add Reference dialog refuses to do it, claiming that the assembly is not a bona-fide WP7 assembly, so have to add it to the .csproj file by hand.

15:00 In order to allow users to setup multiplayer games, I’m going to need to show some kind of UI. WP7 doesn’t allow you to mix and match Silverlight and XNA within one App. I don’t really fancy rolling my own UI library, so I start casting around for one. A helpful post on the XNA forums provides a list libraries for XNA in general, though only a couple of them support WP7.

15:35 Start investigating Nuclex UserInterface library, a UI library for XNA that claims support for WP7. Initially it looks quite promising: I can get it to render a couple of buttons. But I can’t make the buttons respond when I tap them.

17:15. I give up on Nuclex, and look for something else. The most promising looking framework is XPF, from Red Badger. It’s ambitious: it aims to replicate some of the core features of Silverlight for the XNA framework, including layout, data binding and animation. They have nightly builds available now, but they’re only valid for 30 days from the build date, and there’s no word yet on a release date, or indeed what the cost of a license will be. Do I take a chance on it?

What are your thoughts? Have I missed a framework that will save me hours? Get in touch: @samuel_d_jack on Twitter, or by email.