…thoughts on software development
Yes, it seems that everything that gets added to the Xbox Live Marketplace doesn’t show up on my xbox until several days after release. XNA Creators Club is no exception. I was hoping to see my rotating greenish wired sphere in glorious 720p on 40″ LCD… guess I’ll just have to wait.
Update: after some postings on the forum, Michael Clucher and his XNA Team is now looking into the issue. I’ll keep you posted with the progress.
Now we know there’s a launch party going on over at Microsoft campus, Redmond. Does that mean we’ll get the released product today also? I certainly hope so. And my hope was rekindled when the download center listed both the XNA Framework Redistributable 1.0 and XNA Game Studio Express 1.0.Guess who’s downloading as we speak!
…my, this is so fresh, even the XNA Developer Center nor the XNA Team blog is updated with the news.
Update: now they’ve done it. Congratulations to the xna dev team, I’m truly looking forward to the times to come!
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
Sweet! Vista, both 32 and 64 bit versions, was made available for download yesterday evening. The iso image contains the following Vista editions:
..now I’m off to download a brand new operating system 
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 
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!
