The other day Mark sent me a link to Wired, basically talking about how indie games were looking to be a big deal this year.  The article really played up the fact that the Playstation 3 seems to be leading in this particular department.  That bummed me out a bit.  I hate being a Microsoft fanboy, but I started playing around with XNA way back when it first came out.  The indie game idea seemed really cool, especially with the ability to deploy to one of the latest generation of consoles.  But after reading that article I was feeling like the XBOX 360 and Microsoft had missed the boat.  XNA came out a while ago, and here we are able to create games, but we aren't really able to share them.  Well apparently that is changing.  Soon....

The quick version:  Microsoft is adding the ability for developers to publish their games to XBOX Live.  What they are calling "Subscriber Peers" (I'm guessing these are Creators Club members?) will be able to download the games, play them, and review them.  If the games "pass" (what all goes into "passing", I don't know), they will be added to the global catalog on the XBOX Live Marketplace....meaning available to anybody.  If you want to read more, go here:  http://forums.xna.com/ShowThread.aspx?PostID=46554

A preview starts YESTERDAY!  It's available now.  Not the full blown system listed above, but a preview.  You can download the game launcher for free, right now.  RIGHT NOW!  It's only available until Feb 24th.  So go get it.  You can then play seven preview games.  One was the winner of last year's Dream Build Play contest.  My favorite happens to be the Jelly Car game.  It's super simple, and super fun.  Try them all.

Did I mention it's only available for another couple of days?  Go get it!

I usually run Query Analyzer Sql Server Management Studio with my query results being displayed as text.  But every now and then I really need them to show up in a grid...usually for copying and pasting.  Whenever this happens it's always a process of me sitting there clicking through menus until I remember that you can change that setting under  Tools -> Options -> Query Results -> Default destination for result

What a pain in the ass. 

Today I discovered the keyboard shortcut for making this change and committed it to memory (AKA the yellow sticky note on my monitor).  Here they are for you, and for me when I forget sometime in the near future.

CTRL+D: Results in a grid
CTRL+T: Results as text

Another one that Mark was asking me about the other day... how to insert a NULL into a column when you have the table open in Management Studio.

CTRL+0  (zero)

If you are dead set on never touching the mouse, here is the definitive list from SQL Server 2005 Books Online:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174205.aspx

They don't seem to have that insert NULL shortcut listed there though.  I wonder if any others are missing?