Bytes by MSDN: Andre Vrignaud and Rob Cameron discuss XNA & Mobile Development

Listen in as Rob Cameron chats with Andre Vrignaud, Senior Technical Evangelist at Microsoft, about the exciting announcements around the commonalities between XNA and mobile development.

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About Andre

Ozymandias is the Xbox Live gamertag of Andre Vrignaud, as well as his platform to speak to gamers and the game industry directly. Andre has worked at Microsoft since 2002, helping manage the overall gaming platform strategy for Xbox, Xbox Live, and Windows. Recently he's started thinking more about mobile gaming as well. This means his job is to look out ahead one to five years and try to project where Microsoft, our competition, and the game industry in general will be. He takes that thinking, the work many other folks do internally, and coalesces it into a roadmap that he takes out to Microsoft game developers and publishers. Of equal importance, he also helps take feedback Microsoft hears from those partners and makes sure the right teams internally have it so they can react appropriately.

Andre has been working in the game industry for over 20 years. He started out as a tester (back in the days when you could start as a tester) at Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI), where he worked on a variety of AD&D games as well as one of the first MMOs to ever be released – Dark Sun Online. After SSI he joined the Total Entertainment Network (TEN) where he helped build one of the first online gaming networks. In fact, TEN is one of the major reasons he joined Microsoft as Xbox Live is, in many ways, a modern version of what they tried to do with TEN (except that now we have a much larger audience, huge broadband penetration, and Daddy Warbucks backing us up.) TEN died a horrible start-up death due to being too early and eventually became Pogo (which was then was acquired by EA to be their casual games arm). After TEN he worked at Intel where he managed their PC games strategy, coincidentally was involved with some of the early Xbox/Intel negotiations, and finally had the opportunity to join the Xbox team back in 2002.

About Rob

Employed by Microsoft since 2001, Rob Cameron is an Industry Architect Evangelist with Microsoft Corporation based out of Atlanta, Georgia. As part of Microsoft's Communication Sector Developer & Platform Evangelism team, Rob focuses on development tools and technologies focused on mobile devices, gaming, and embedded devices for telecommunications, cable, and media & entertainment companies. Rob co-authored several titles including Building ASP.NET Server Controls, Pro ASP.NET 3.5 Server Controls and AJAX Components, Silverlight 2 Recipes, and most recently Silverlight 3 Recipes. He has a master's degree in information technology management and a bachelor's degree in computer science. Visit Rob's blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/RobCamer.

Stuff Andre and Rob recommend you check out

• Andre's blog
• Watch Scott Guthrie and Joe Belfiore's keynote at MIX10
• Getting started with Windows Phone Development
• Windows Phone Developer Center
• Windows Phone Developer Tools
• Windows Phone Developer team blog