Happy Holidays
Happy Holidays to everyone :)!
Haven’t been coding for the last 2 months as I’ve been pretty busy, but now that the new year is upon us I’m looking really forward to jumping right back into it.
Microsoft Advertising Crash
We recently received a report about a crash happening in the Microsoft Advertising SDK.
Game: Halcyon
Device: T7575
Exception: NullReferenceException
Stack: Microsoft.Advertising.Mobile.Shared.WebRequestWrapper.WebRespCallback(IAsyncResult result)
Microsoft seems to be working on a fix already as seen in the below quote.
Hello All,
Our dev team is testing an update for this issue currently. Unfortunately I don’t have an exact date on when it will be available at this time.
- Nick Grizzell
This error occured when the user navigated away from the application while it was in the process of fetching an ad.
I’ve fixed this by doing the following.
I hooked both “Microsoft.Phone.Shell.PhoneApplicationService.Current.Activated” and “Microsoft.Phone.Shell.PhoneApplicationService.Current.Deactivated” events, Deactivated is fired when a user navigates away from your application and Activated when they re-navigate to it.
Deactivated:
pubCenterObject.RemoveAll();
pubCenterObject = null;
Activated:
pubCenterObject = AdGameComponent.Current;
pubCenterObject.CreateAd( Config.PubCenterID, new Rectangle( 0, 0, 480, 80 ) );
As you can see, in Deactivated we remove all instances of DrawableAd, then in Activated we create a new instance of DrawableAd, This fixes the issue and helps out until Microsoft releases their fix.
Halcyon Update
We pushed an update out for Halcyon this week, It contains quite a few UI and Gameplay tweaks (See a full list @ our website), But the main change is the changeover from AdDuplex to PubCenter.
Instead of replacing AdDuplex completely we ported the WP7 Ad Rotator to XNA and edited it for our use, Anywhere PubCenter is available users are served their ads and everywhere else gets served AdDuplex ads, We also use AdDuplex as a fallback network for PubCenter if an error occurs and use an internal ad if both fail.
Halcyon Submitted
We finally were able to submit Halcyon to the marketplace for approval today after some extra QA time.
Check out this video of the game in action!
SC2Ranks.com C++ Library
I developed a C++ library for SC2Ranks.com since there wasn’t one available and I was in the process of writing an application that needed to pull player data.
You can find the project at google code, located here.
