XNA Game Studio Express Launch Event Summary

Yow-Hann Lee — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 11:04:00 GMT

About a week ago, the XNA Team posted a blog entry about hosting an XNA Game Studio Express Launch Event. This comes in celebration of their v1.0 release today.

Having already attended a talk by Charles Cox, he did a good job of doing a five minute compressed demonstration of getting a 3D object rendering and responding to controller inputs. Unfortunately, throughout the night, there were technical difficulties with the microphone setup. All in all, it was a fun night. I had originally debated whether or not to attend another one of the Jon Pincus' Mashup Event (the first of which was quite engaging) or the launch. This proved to be a great opportunity to get fellow co-workers to take a peek at XNA. Aside from demos, one of the presenters highlighted Turbo Squid, a library full of 3D models and textures.

Unfortunately, due to work restrictions, I was not qualified to participate in the draws to win one of three Xbox 360s. Major Nelson (name - Larry Hryb) was calling out the winners. For Xbox advocates and podcast listeners, this guy is well known (his blog can be found here).

On the same day XNA released v1 of Game Studio Express, GarageGames, makers of Torque, made their Torque X available to the general public for download as an "Open Beta".

Day 2 - Seattle Code Camp

Yow-Hann Lee — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 09:38:00 GMT

Day 1 - Seattle Code Camp

Yow-Hann Lee — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 05:36:00 GMT

This is the second time I have attended a citywide code camp. The first was back in Vancouver earlier this year at the inaugural Vancouver Code Camp. Preparation for the second annual event is already under way there. Seeing as the code camp was a blast, I didn't want to miss out on the one here in Redmond. This one is larger in terms of the number of speakers than the one held in Vancouver. Nevertheless, Medhat Elmasry did a great job with the code camp there and the .NET User Group in general. Since there is another day of code camp to go, I would recommend people out in the Vancouver area to make the 2.5 hour trip for Day 2 of Code Camp.

Onto the technologies...

I attended two sessions on XNA and one on IIS 7.0 (there are four timeslots you can attend, but I missed one to take my driver's written test). Because there were so many options to choose from in each timeslot, I'd be interested in reading feedback on what some of the other sessions were like.

IIS7

There weren't too many attendees for Brett Hill's talk. My guess would be that some people feel that it is too far down the road (at least a year) for them to start caring about. I was surprised to hear that the IIS team is a twenty person unit (some in the team don't have 100% of their time allocated for it) that falls under Scott Guthrie's reign.

An ex-coworker had pointed out www.iis.net a few months ago and commented on the lack of non-UI related changes. I suspected it was just more difficult to show off non-visual features and well, it is now a few months down the road now. It's analogous to how really cool features for IT Pros and developers in Vista are not as well publicized as the sexy UI improvements.

In any case, one of the most valuable things you can take away from this talk is CONTROL. IIS 6.0 and previous versions were basically black boxes. All requests went through a pipeline that IT pros and developers had no control over. Now, it is much more modular and you control what is included in the pipeline. Sounds like they have taken a chapter out of the open source world? (Apache...). In terms of configuration, they've taken it and merged it up with your web.config file in ASP.NET. And this applies to non-.NET apps as well. Think of the control it gives developers now and basically/hopefully moving to an xcopy approach for deployment (reduces communication/transfer of instructions to IT Ops or at least that is what I think their intention is?). One higher up from the website configuration level is IIS' applicationhost.config, just another xml file. And if you take it another level, imagine if each web server all pointed to a common master setting. Sounds like it would scale well.

Speaking of scaling, here are a couple fun marketing tidbits about IIS (albeit the RTM versions):

MySpace runs IIS - site sees approx 23 billion page views/month

According to a recent study, 54% of companies on the Fortune 1000 list use IIS.

XNA

Some really cool stuff presented. More on this later.....

One thing I would love to see in the Seattle Code Camp is for the presentation materials to be available for download. Right now, I don't see something on http://seattle.techevents.info for this. They may have done this last year and will do so after the code camp is over?