Our people
Chris Williams
CODE Author
Chris G. Williams is a Senior Developer for Fluor Government Group, a nine-year multiple Microsoft MVP awardee (VB, XNA/DirectX, Windows Phone) and the author of Professional Windows Phone Game Development.
He’s authored numerous articles on a variety of technologies, led a 14-city speaking tour, and has a series of mobile development webinars produced through DevExpress.com.
Chris is a regular presenter at conferences, code camps, and user groups around the country. He blogs at GeeksWithBlogs (.net) and also manages the MonoGame Indie Devs technical community on Facebook.
Detailed Biography
Chris G. Williams is a Senior Developer for Fluor Government Group, a nine-year multiple Microsoft MVP awardee (VB, XNA/DirectX, Windows Phone) and the author of Professional Windows Phone Game Development.
He’s authored numerous articles on a variety of technologies, led a 14-city speaking tour, and has a series of mobile development webinars produced through DevExpress.com.
Chris is a regular presenter at conferences, code camps, and user groups around the country. He blogs at GeeksWithBlogs (.net) and also manages the MonoGame Indie Devs technical community on Facebook.
Articles Authored
Articles
Showing 1–20 of 20
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Building an Alexa Skill with AWS Lambda
Your household will never be the same after you get Alexa. Chris shows you how to help her understand your requests by building a small trivia game.
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Software Archaeology
In "Software Archaeology," Chris Williams explores the challenges and strategies of working with legacy code, drawing from his extensive experience as a developer since the 1980s. The article delves into practical approaches for understanding and maintaining old or unfamiliar codebases, such as mapping functionality, leveraging debugging tools, and resisting the urge to refactor unnecessarily. Through real-world examples, including his own projects and inherited applications, Chris emphasizes the importance of balancing practicality with respect for existing architectural choices, while offering actionable tips to navigate the complexities of outdated systems. Ultimately, he advocates for adaptability and structured exploration to tame the chaos of legacy software.
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Use Your Words: Getting Familiar with Speech Synthesis Markup Language
Chris explores how voice-enabled home assistant devices, like Amazon Echo and Google Home, speak to you and how they learn to understand your particular speech patterns.
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What’s New in C# 7.0
Just when you think you know what’s up in C#, they release a new version. This one’s got pattern matching, tuples, and local functions along with improvements to existing features. Chris shows you where to dive in.
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Programming Alexa Skills for the Amazon Echo
If you’re looking for a way to computerize your home or add voice controls to your apps, you’re interested in what’s happening with Amazon Echo. Chris introduces you to some basic programming skills for the device and points the way to greatness.
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XNA is Dead; Long Live the New XNA, MonoGame
In this article, Chris Williams presents MonoGame as the modern, open-source successor to Microsoft's XNA framework, enabling cross-platform game development beyond Microsoft devices. He details MonoGame's evolution from XNA, its broad platform support, and offers a practical guide for setting up the development environment, creating basic game projects, rendering text and images, handling input, and implementing animations. Through hands-on examples, Williams aims to empower developers—especially indies—to leverage MonoGame’s capabilities for multi-platform game creation, emphasizing starting small and building foundational skills with this versatile framework.
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Taking the Mystery Out of Cryptocurrencies
Bitcoin has been in the news a lot lately. If you ever wondered how it worked, you’ll want to read what Chris has to say.
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Building CodeTweet for Windows Phone
In this article, we take a look at what’s involved with building a simple Twitter Search client for Windows Phone. We will cover what tools you need, where to download them, how to design, build and test the app and finally, how to publish it to the Windows Phone Marketplace.
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MVP Corner: Looking Back on the Great VB/C# War
Recently, I received an email comment on a blog post I wrote roughly 3 1/2 years ago. I had completely forgotten about writing the post, but as soon as I saw the title I remembered every word of it. It also got me thinking about who the guy was that wrote it... then and now.
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New Features in XNA 4.0 and Windows Phone 7
In this practical guide Chris Williams introduces XNA Game Studio 4.0 for Windows Phone 7, showing how to set up the tools and use the familiar XNA game loop while highlighting phone-specific features—device orientation, accelerometer input, and multi-touch gestures—with step‑by‑step code examples to load fonts, handle orientation changes, read accelerometer data, and implement gestures like tap, drag, pinch and flick, enabling developers new to XNA or mobile game development to quickly build interactive phone games.
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Embracing Community: Becoming a Speaker
Chris Williams embracing community Nov/Dec 10 column.
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Embracing Community: GiveCamps
What is community? A quick look at the Wikipedia defines community as “a group of interacting organisms sharing an environment” and I think that pretty much nails it. In this column, I talk about the developer community as a whole and highlight some people, organizations and events I think you should check out.
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Starting Your Own User Group
What is community?A quick look at the Wikipedia defines community as “a group of interacting organisms sharing an environment” and I think that pretty much nails it. In this series, I’ll talk about the developer community as a whole and highlight some people, organizations and events I think you should check out.
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Embracing Community
Chris launches a new series about the developer community and highlights some people, organizations, and events that you should know about.What is community?A quick look at the Wikipedia defines community as “a group of interacting organisms sharing an environment” and I think that pretty much nails it. In this new series, I’ll be talking about the developer community as a whole and highlighting some people, organizations and events I think you should check out.
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Dances with Workflows (One Newbie’s Journey)
Recently I started working with a client that was interested in using Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) in their application.Having never used WF before, I thought it might be interesting to document the experience and my assumptions as I started learning and implementing the technology in production.
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MVP Corner: We Are the Masters of the Twitterverse
How did we ever survive without social networks? I asked myself that today and couldn’t come up with an answer I liked. If I need to find contact information for that DBA I worked with three jobs ago, it’s off to LinkedIn or Plaxo. When I’m wondering about that guy from high school who was going to be a world famous rock star, Facebook is only a couple of clicks away. Out of town for a conference? No worries, I just check Twitter to see where my friends are.