I've been messing around with XNA Game Studio Express a lot lately.  It's been fun.  A lot of ideas for future projects spring to mind.  But today a harsh reality hit me square in the face.  I hadn't been too worried about the fact that the Game Studio currently only works with C# 2005 Express.  But today, the game project that I'm working on has gotten big enough that I want to use some Source Control.  Guess what?  C# 2005 Express does support Source Control.  Wonderful! 

So it looks like it's back to doing it old school.  Check out the file before you start working on it....or forget to check it out, do a bunch of work, hit save, and get prompted with the "Cannot save this file..." message.  Oh Boy!

I just downloaded the CTP of XNA Build.  Which is supposed to be for Visual Studio 2005.  More when I get that installed......

The XNA Team recently released a video that shows a bunch of clips from games that were created using XNA.  Some of them look pretty cool.  Here's the link to Major Nelson's post, which has a link to the video.

Happy Birthday Marines!

Back when I was but a young geek, I would sit in my bedroom and type source code from a computer magazine (I forget the name) into my VIC-20 computer.  I would spend multiple hours doing this, and at the end of it all I would be able to play tic-tac-toe. 

Good times, good times......

Do you remember that The Shatner used to do ads for the VIC-20?  See the video below:

Another Flash based time waster.

Double Wires

Every year around this time I write a post talking about how much I like my watch.  Guess what?  I still like it.  I’m usually reminded of it this time of year because I have to decide if I want to pay the $50 to keep using the MSN Direct service.  I chose to renew it this year.  I’ll still read the news on it every now and then when I ride the bus to work.  I still use it to check football scores when my wife has drug me out shopping on a Saturday afternoon.  I don’t really use it too much for the IM features anymore.  But the one area where it is still indispensable is reminding me when I have a meeting.  That one feature (synching up with Outlook) is worth its weight in gold.

One of the things that first intrigued me about the technology was the hopes that I would be able to write code for it.  Unfortunately at the time when I got the watch you had to buy a development kit that included a chip to test your code on.  In the end I wasn’t interested enough to buy the development kit.

But now you can develop for the SPOT platform in Visual Studio using the .NET Micro Framework and SPOT emulator. It seems pretty cool when you first use it.  That is until you realize that there doesn’t seem to be a way to get that to an actual device.  Right now I can’t write some code that does something, and push that down to a device like a watch.  Plus, even if you could, there isn’t a whole lot of useful stuff that can be done without being able to access the radio spectrum and get some real-time communication.  One application that I can think of off the top of my head that doesn’t need the real time communication would be to load and have the ability to read certain bus schedules so that I don’t have to look online or have a paper copy handy.

Actually, I guess that bus thing would be more “useful” than “cool”.  You actually do have the ability to do something cool, and that something is called Sumobot.  The SDK comes with a Sumobot emulator and startup code.  You can even buy a Sumobot kit that you can build and push your code out to!  Another thing you can also do with the Sumobot is enter a Sumobot Contest.  I’ve already submitted mine.  Anybody else up for some Sumobot?