VISUAL STUDIO CODENAME "ORCAS" BETA 1 NOW AVAILABLE

Microsoft has released the first beta build of the next version of Visual Studio product family (known as "Orcas").

The first great thing is that you can donload and betatest a fully functional version of the Team Suite, either by downloading ISO images -not available yet- or the VPC images (for the latter, you will need to download Virtual PC 2007). I had previously downloaded March CTP's VPC images and everything worked ok.

But this time, there's something more, with this release comes the beta builds for the VS Express editions. Although I have not installed VC# Express "Orcas" yet -I'm downloading the installation files as I write this post- it seems we'll be getting an object-relational UML designer tool (probably a lite version of it).

Great news!

[BTW, does anybody know whether the upcoming release of XNA GSE will support "Orcas" VC# express edition?]

TUTORIAL: INTRODUCTION TO XNA

There's a new tutorial available on c-sharpcorner.com site entitled: "Introduction to XNA: The Microsoft 2D and 3D Game Development Platform" -by Mike Gold.

From Mike's post: "... Although I couldn't name all the episodes, I think I watched every original Star Trek episode that was produced. My fascination with Star Trek didn't end with the original, but continued into the Next Generation. After that, I kinda lost track...Anyway, this month, Microsoft came out with an article in MSDN on the XNA framework, written by Charles Cox and Michael Klucher. I became intrigued and decided to pursue exploring the XNA Framework. In doing so, I created this simple example. Most of the inspiration for this article didn't come from the MSDN article, but from a game called elves revenge on a website called Errolian. By examining this code, I was able to piece together this demonstration of XNA ...".

Read on.

A GLIMPSE ON XNA'S PER PIXEL LIGHTING

Yes, you've read it right: on the upcoming release, the XNA Framework will add a "built-in" per pixel lighting -through the "BasicEffect" class, and Shawn's explains how to deal with it.

From Shawn's post: "... Per-vertex lighting is efficient, and it looks good on models that contain lots of highly tessellated triangles or which don't use too much specular. It can look pretty bad on lower resolution meshes, though, ..."`.

Read on ...

UPDATE: "BULLET HELL TACTICS"

Bullet Hell Tactics' getting a graphics update as you can tell from this catchy titlescreen.

From the post: "... Tonight I worked with some new graphics for player shield and the "energypacks" the enemies drop. Sometimes it's fun to just sit and play around with colors and some filters in photoshop, what a difference - so much better! ...".

Nice!