Oh why? You try stuff and it doesn’t work

I am very excited about the Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games, but was unable to get the download to play Tic-Tae-Toe.  Don’t get me wrong, the owner(s) of this product are awesome and the documentation is sterling. (Thanks to Wade Wegner, Nathan Totten and others!)

On the other hand, don’t you get frustrated by things that clearly work on some other machine doesn’t’ work on yours?  What should you do to make the open source product work for you?

What do you do about that?

Here are some steps you can take, especially if you are a student, click on the “Discussions” and ask a question in the forum. 

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Following is for students (if you are not a student, please ignore)

******Beginning of student stuff***********

It is important that you use your best grammar and make sure that you clearly include which version of Visual Studio (Express, Pro, Ultimate), operating system (x86 for 32 bit Win7 or 64 bit Win7, Server in Client mode).

********End of student stuff*****************

In my case I ask the following question, after spending an hour or so making sure I was doing everything exactly like the instructions (my goal was to check out the download code, sometimes referred to as bits, instructions and so forth).  My examination process included making sure my Azure set-up ran a simple Push Notification using the template provided by the the Windows Azure Toolkit (it did)

Tic-Tac-Toe doesn’t work

SocalSam

Thu at 8:48 PM

Edited Thu at 8:58 PM

I just installed the 1.2.0 beta version on 1/5/2012 using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate (as adminstrator) and ran the Tic-Tac-Toe program following the Readme Word Document instructions. O/S is Win7, 64 bit.

After starting the first instance, I used the Tic-tac-toe invitation code in an "InPrivate" Internet Explorer and when I clicked go, no game board showed up.

Also the players instances/profile did not show either on the Tic-Tac-Toe page of the web sites on either player web site.

Admittedly this could be my system, but the compute emulator is running and all of the installation is correct. I have not done any trouble shooting other than the running of the program.

Note: My system does successfully run the Windows Phone Cloud Template which implements Push Notification

.

Why Bother?

Open source software may appear to be free, but there is a “responsibility” that you have to make the open source software work, you have to spend time giving feedback to the community.  If you don’t, not a big deal, but good ideas like the Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games could use your feedback and interest.

Finally

Big thanks to Wade Wegner, Nathan Totten and others for their awesome work on this toolkit!