februar 2008 - Posts
The ecosystem team for Visual Studio just announced a brand new site for finding extensions built for Visual Studio.
http://visualstudiogallery.com
The goal for the team is to give the developers an easy way to find extensions for Visual Studio
Read more from Soma's post about it here.
I held a talk yesterday (28th of february 2008) a talk about XNA. The talk is pretty much what I held at Game Camp last year which was a revised version of what I had at NNUG Bergen in October last year.
Anywho, if you're interested in the material you can download it from this posts attachment.
The solution is a city in which you move around in with your Xbox gamepad or keyboard (arrow keys to move, A for flying up, Z for flying down, U for looking up and D for looking down).
We're back on track NNUG Vestfold is hosting another user group meeting.
This time we will have a deeper look at test driven development and the use of mocking.
Thomas Eyde will come and talk about TDD and Fredrik Kalseth will do a follow up with the use of TypeMock, and then he will conclude with a deeper look at Jetbrains Resharper
Signup here.
A friend of mine; Hans Petter Harveg, just emailed me an interesting error message they got when installing the .net 3.5 framework.
It must be the good old chicken and the egg story, I'm sure.. :)
Microsoft has announced that they will offer a preview release of XNA 3.0 in spring of 2008 timeframe with a final release scheduled for the 2008 holiday season.
XNA 3.0 will contain give the developers the ability to create content for Zune.
Read more over at the XNA teams blog.
I've been working quite a bit the last two weeks with setting up a continuous integration build regime at work along side a big refactoring job that includes a lot of files and directories moving about.
In TFS2005 the default path for builds was $\<your project>\TeamBuildTypes\<build name>. This is more customizable in TFS2008 and I wanted to take advantage of that. I figured that our build types should be within the branch, so that when we're branching out we can branch out even the build types. Using the Source Control Explorers move action, I started moving about our builds. The next thing I needed to do was to update the build definition by going to the Team Explorer in Visual Studio and rightclicking the build I wanted to edit and choose to edit the build definition. Selected the project file page. Much to my surprise, the path for the project file has already been updated. Turns out that the build part of TFS figured out I moved the files and decided to update this automagically. Quite a nice feature, if you ask me. Saved me a bit of work, seeing that we have a few builds.
I entered the European Silverlight Challenge with a Silverlight Slotmachine game and ended up halfway on the results list. I'm pretty happy with that result, giving that I only spent 3 full days on the solution. The graphics for the game was made by a friend of mine; Sigurd Kristiansen (Simian), for a project I worked on in 2001 at a company I co-founded with a couple of other guys; Hermes Interactive.
You can play the game and download the source code here.
This year Game Camp will be on tour and host several events.
I was asked earlier to hold an XNA talk at NNUG (Norwegian .Net User Group) in Oslo and will have this on the 26th of february.
If you want to come and listen to a fast introduction to XNA and you happen to be in the neighbourhood, stop
by the event page and register.
JetBrains has provided access to the nightly builds of Resharper.
I know I dare to install them, do you.. :)
http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/ReSharper/ReSharper+4.0+Nightly+Builds
This is probably not a show stopper for most of you, more of an interesting bug..
You are by default declined to not join the customer experience program.. :) The OK button is disabled.
By clicking the "Joint the Windows...." radiobutton and then click the "I don't want..." radiobutton, you're able to click the OK button.
An effective way to get people to join the Customer Experience Improvement Program, I'm sure..
If you have access to an MSDN subscription, you can now download the Windows Vista Service Pack 1.
You'll find it under the "Top subscribers downloads" at the MSDN subscriptions page.
Finally we're getting a developers conference in Norway; NDC.
It will be held in 17th and 18th of June at Radisson SAS Scandinavia Hotel, Oslo.
The official site was officially launched yesterday as well :
http://www.ndc2008.no
Welcome to the version 1.0 of our new design over at Game Camp
Our frontpage now looks a bit different and you're probably wondering where the tutorials, photos and download sections are.
They are all now located under the resources section.
Besides this everything should be were you found it before.
We hope the new design is more soothing and will motivate you to use the site more. :)
I started looking into the profiling API this friday, thanks to a colleague of mine at work; Fredrik Kalseth.
He started working on an AOP framework and came into my office and we discussed the possibility to use the profiler API to achieve a better result for an AOP framework. There's been a lot of studies on the subject and a couple of solutions as well, AOP.net is one of them.
The principle is very simple; intercept any calls being made to methods in a managed type and modify the execution path by calling before, after, around advices.
By hooking up the JITCompilationStarted callback that the ICorProfilerInfo2 interface provides we can do this really slick and very optimal as well. The ICorProfilerInfo2 provides us with two methods ; GetILFunctionBody and SetILFunctionBody. These can be used to get the current body of the method and then modify it and saving it back before it is JIT compiled. The advantage of doing this is that you only need to do it once per type during the lifecycle of your process, giving it a very low impact for doing this. This method does not work with assemblies that has been installed with NGEN, so adding AOP to existing framework bits might prove difficult. :)
One of the quirks with using the CLR profiling API is that you need to set a couple of environment variables in order for it to work, you need to enable profiling and then set the GUID for the COM object representing the profiler. This is something that will look very odd if you have an application you're sending out to customers. I started fiddling with the idea of how I could get about this issue and came up with a solution I found interesting; our entrypoint will not be a managed executable, but an unmanaged entrypoint that hosts the CLR and configures the environment programmatically before starting the CLR.
My prototype at the moment is very very rough, so I won't be publishing any code for this post, but sometime in the near future I will be sharing some of my findings and sourcecode. Seeing that the title of this post is postfixed with Part 1 - I've given myself the necessary pressure to create a Part 2.
Finally Microsoft has finished the long awaited Service Pack 1 for Vista. Congratulations!
You can read more about it over at the Windows Vista Team Blog.
It won't be available for public download as of yet :
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In mid-March, we will release Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update (in English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese) and to the download center on microsoft.com. Customers who visit Windows Update can choose to install Service Pack 1. If Windows Update determines that the system has one of the drivers we know to be problematic, then Windows Update will not offer SP1. Since we know that some customers may want to update to SP1 anyhow, the download center will allow anyone who wants to install SP1 to do so.
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In mid-April, we will begin delivering Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Vista customers who have chosen to have updates downloaded automatically. That said, any system that Windows Update determines has a driver known to not update successfully will not get SP1 automatically. As updates for these drivers become available, they will be installed automatically by Windows Update, which will unblock these systems from getting Service Pack 1. The result is that more and more systems will automatically get SP1, but only when we are confident they will have a good experience.
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The remaining languages will RTM in April.
In addition the RTM version of Windows Server 2008 is also available, read more here.
Congrats on that one as well. :)
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