The Klog

…has just been totally insane and non-stop but has also been rather fun at the same time
Monday June 2nd marked the day for my last exam. Real Time Analysis and Design will go down in history not only as the last exam of the year but as my last ever University exam. As of now, I am now no longer a student!

Following this, i met up with my Final Year Project supervisor who informed me that my project (Virus Hunter) was good enough to warrant a First Class mark. I also heard good news from the rest of our games based group so well done guys!

Tuesday marked the official GameCity 2008 launch in Nottingham and the session included several talks from Local Nottingham Officials (who, despite living in Nottingham all my life, i have never heard of!) the highlight of the event had to be the free bar and the totally awesome food that was on offer. Me and the rest of the final years at the event were also able to have a chat with the NTU lecturers and offer some input on how the course can be improved on for future generations of NTU Computer Science grads.

On Wednesday I was back at home but busy as always. I spent most of the day putting together and XNA talk to be delivered at the MSP event. The session included and introduction to the framework and some lovely demos as well as the second demonstration of Virus Hunter. By this point i was scared it was all going to go wrong.

Thursday it was up at 5am to get the Train to our nation’s glorious capital city for the Imagine Cup 2008 UK Finals. This prestigious event was held at the Microsoft office in cardinal place and included talks from Microsoft’s Mark Taylor as well as several environmental officials.

The UK Imagine Cup winners were also announced and congratulations go out to fellow MSPs Dominic Green and Ben Nunney (team Revolve, Evolve, Solve) for winning the Software Development category

I also managed to get onto the Winners list by winning the MSP Star Award. For this I’m getting to visit the Microsoft Corp Office in Seattle very soon to take part in some MSP related shenanigans! I totally wasn’t expecting it and it was a very nice surprise to round off a great day.

After a quick check in to the hotel, it was off to Bar Ha Ha for the Imagine Cup party. This was a great chance to catch up with the guys at Microsoft, Rare and other companies and compete in the Rock Band tournament which our MSP team lost, and badly at that!

Friday marked the final MSP event and consisted of several sessions delivered by MSPS including my session on XNA. I think this went down really well and you can get the content for yourself off my SkyDrive here.

After a quick coffee, it was down to St Pancras to catch the train back to Nottingham.

What a week! but what made it all worth it? Gotta be the PopFly Duck!

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Quite often I get asked how I managed to get a @live.com email address for my Windows Live ID outside the US. Visiting the Hotmail page only allows you to select @hotmail.com or @hotmail.co.uk or visiting the Live page only allows you to select @live.co.uk if residence is on the shores of Britannia.

If you want a @live.com address, simply visit this page and sign up as you normally would. This domain hasnt been out too long so you should be able to get yourself something like your.name@live.com.

If you already have a Live ID (through Hotmail, Live, or a personal address you have converted into a Live ID) you can link the two accounts together. Simply sign in to your current account and on the top right control bar select the drop down arrow next to your name. Select the “Link Accounts” option, enter in your new details and the two accounts will now be linked.

Linking will keep your inboxes separate and allows you to access any of your accounts from a single sign in. Very handy!

Fresh off the press at Microsoft Research today comes The WorldWide Telescope.

With this application, Users can navigate and view the many stars, planets, galaxies and other celestial objects that make up our universe all from the comfort of your office chair.

The application functions a lot like Google Earth but looking in the opposite direction. The pictures that make up the universe mesh have been collected from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Centre, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and many others.

You are free to browse the galaxy as you will but the application also has a guided tour feature and a handy right click “finder scope” that will give you detailed information on the picture you are currently looking at.

Go an grab this fantastic piece of software for yourself here, the site also features some typical cheesy marketing videos for your viewing pleasure

EDIT

I have just noticed that this also has support for the Xbox 360 controller! So now you really can sit back, relax and enjoy the wonders of space flight!

David Weller, one of the totally awesome members of the XNA Evangelist team at Microsoft recently announced the release of the CTP Version of XNA Game Studio 3.0 and you can go grab it from here

As well as all the other cool offerings the XNA platform offers to game developers, XNA mark 3 offers the following additional functionality:

Support for game deployment to the Zune – a great feature, but now we just the thing here in the UK!

Support for Visual Studio 2008 Standard (and higher) plus support for Visual Studio C# Express 2008 to help keep things free.

If you are a student, don’t forget you can get hold of VS2008 through the MSDN AA or DreamSpark

Unfortunately, this CTP does not include support for Xbox deployment or support for 64 bit operating systems, but these features will be fully incorporated in time for RTM during the summer

XNA 3.0 Installer

The VS2008 New Project Menu with XNA 3.0 Templates

To convert your XNA 2.0 games, simply open the solution file up in Visual Studio 2008 and you will be prompted with a project conversion wizard that just takes a few seconds to complete, compile and away you go!