Version 2.0 of BlockAddiction has passed marketplace certification and is available for download now. The biggest change is the all new Time Attack mode where you have to survive for 60 seconds and score as high as possible. Game Over means no score.

BlockAddiction has reached well over 400 downloads and is available on Windows Phone marketplace (Link).

I was thinking about an About page and advertising but I figured ads could ruin the experience and I completely forgot about the About page. I might add it in the future but for now my focus shifted to some other projects.

If you’ve got ideas, bug reports or some other feedback, leave a comment, contact me via Twitter or send me a mail!

So Techdays is right around the corner and I’ll be attending for the third time.I’ll be attending all kinds of sessions going from Windows 8 development to the complete deep dive track on web to my favorite subject, Windows Phone 7 development. I’m also excited about the Scott “The Gu” Guthrie doing the opening keynote and doing a session the second day. Also presenting this year is Laurent Bugnion, the father of the awesome MVVM Light framework.

Here’s the list of sessions I’ll be attending, this list is subject to change depending on if I change my mind the last minute, as I’m known to do sometimes .

Tuesday February 14th

• Opening keynote with Scott Guthrie
• Welcome to the Metro Application Platform
• Windows Phone Fast App Switching, Tombstoning and Multitasking
• The Future of C# and Visual Basic
• Devices + Cloud: Using Azure on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, …

Wednesday February 15th

• ScottGu unplugged
• Take a ride on the Metro
• The zen of async: Best practices for best performance
• MVVM Applied: From Silverlight to Windows Phone to Windows 8
• MVVM & WCF RIA Services: an architectural story
• Building a data intensive application

Thursday February 16th

This is a deep dive day, I’ll be following the web track that focuses on what’s new in ASP.net 4.5 and Visual Studio 11

On 8 January my very first game was published to the Windows Phone marketplace. It’s a very simple game called BlockAddiction, the purpose is to keep stacking the blocks on top of each other while they keep speeding up. Now, 19 days later I’ve reached over 250 downloads with this. It may not seem like a lot but I’m pretty pleased with the result

Right now, I’m working on version 2.0 and it will include a new game mode and some changes:

• Time Attack mode: stack as many blocks as possible within 60 seconds without dying (player has 3 lives)
• About page
• Maybe some ads but only on the menus, I want the game experience to remain the same and completely ad-free

Time Attack mode is almost complete, just have to develop the difference between time up and game over. Then I need to find out how to add an about page to an XNA game, but more about that later.

For those who want to try out the current version of BlockAddiction, search for it on the marketplace or click here!

I’ve spent a lot of time searching for a way to get menus and loading screens working in XNA. XNA has no controls like textboxes and buttons like we’re accustomed to in winforms, ASP and so on.

So after searching and only finding half working solutions I decided to share the way I do it with the community.
The result is a five page guide and a link to my solution

Click here to get started!