November 2006 – Peter's Pattern

The Abyss and the Bridge

Yesterday I attended a technical conference where the speaker talked about BizTalk 2006. I had brought along a couple of friends of mine, both keen to learn the new and cool stuff but lacking a multi-year IT industry background.

So I got kinda embarrassed when the speaker started talking about ESB and SOA and totally failed to mention what these acronyms stood for. Ok, so most of the audience probably knew what he was talking about but can you really assume that? How often do we put distance between us and “the others” (who more than often is saluted Dear Customer) by throwing “orchestrations” and “service busses” at ’em.

I tell you, I can feel myself at the edge of the abyss when I try to explain my latest project to my wife… God help me learn building bridges

Vista on MSDN Subscriber Downloads

Sweet! Vista, both 32 and 64 bit versions, was made available for download yesterday evening. The iso image contains the following Vista editions:

Windows Vista Business
Windows Vista Business N
Windows Vista Home Basic
Windows Vista Home Basic N
Windows Vista Home Premium
Windows Vista Starter
Windows Vista Ultimate

..now I’m off to download a brand new operating system Smile

On writing games with XNA

Hey, before I head over to the Iron Architect final: have you tried out the XNA Game Studio Express yet? Sure its a beta 2 but don’t let that frighten you. XNA is actually a new .NET platform for writing games, based on DirectX and the .NET Compact Framework. Rob Miles from the University of Hull, UK, gave an inspiring and humorous talk on XNA in the educational space and also how to get started with XNA. His “Hot Salad Death with Cheese” demo was so kewl, just wait till he makes it available for download Big Smile

The thing with XNA is that it gives us a very clean, managed way of writing games, with all the tools and coziness of the .NET and Visual Studio world. XNA works on both Windows Vista and the XBox 360 which to me makes the framework even cooler. XNA also put a lot of focus on componentization…err, making components out of features in your game… for instance, why re-create a starfield backdrop in all your space shooters when you can create the StarfieldBackdrop component once and then re-use it in all your shooters. Re-use should be a good thing for the game industry. “Hey, my starfield is not going to look the same in all my shooters!” you might say, and yes you’re hopefully right. But still, it will be easier to take that isolated component and improve it instead of having to rip out all those lines of code intertwined in the vast amount of code that makes up your game. Right?

…more on this, too, later… now over to see some great architecture!

Technorati syndication

Technorati Profile

Technorati syndication… sounds like something out of a futuristic sci-fi crime story…but you know, its not. Technorati is a service for those who blog and those who read blogs. So in order to get my stuff over there I need to provide some info to their spiders… no, they are not real spiders. I actually thought Community Server (which is powering this site, for those unaware of it) was pushing my stuff to Technorati atomatically. But seems like I need a Technorati account for that to work… so lets try that and see how it all works out.

Last day at TechEd…going home

After a truly intense week filled with cool tech, good company and too much chocolate covered donuts I am going for the hands-on lab to put some stuff to work. Today will also the winner of the Iron Architect contest be announced …looking forward to see the solutions people have come up with.

This week didn’t become the week of many posts I thought it would be. Well, the posts are in my head, I just need some time to sort ’em all and make some decent blogs out of it. So stay tuned, TechEd may be over soon but the stuff covered here this week is here to stay.

…man, that was cheesy.