I'M GETTING MARRIED IN THE MORNING ...

... as the song goes ... well, actually, not tomorrow but this Friday 25th.

Yeap! After many years of being the last man standing, the ultraplayer, the ultrabachelor, ... or at least in my dreams ... my fiancee Andrea and I have decided to say "yes, I do". The big step ...

Thus, as you may suppose I -in fact we both- have been (and still are) dealing with all the details of the wedding day, party, honey moon these days -plus a "extreme make over" of my near future home- so that's why I may have seemed a bit "distant" to the self-proclaimed task of reporting XNA-related news. Sorry about that, but you know, I've been really busy ... real life ... responsibilities ...

So what does this mean for my blog? Only that I'll be out for the next 4 or 5 weeks, so in the meantime, until I come back, don't worry 'cause you can count on Mykres and Ziggy.

Thanks guys for supporting this site and see you all when I get back. I need some vacation ...

BTW, I cannot go without giving some breaking news: we're all aware of the already released (Benny's) and 3 upcoming books on XNA (check Ziggy's site), but there are two new books to add to that latter list:

• Microsoft XNA Unleashed (Hardcover), and
• Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Xna Game Studio Express in 24 Hours: Complete Starter Kit.

Ok, guys, see ya.

Pete's out!

TESTDRIVEN.NET AND XNA

There has been many questions in the XNA Creators Club's forums regarding unit tests with the express editions and particularly with XNA GSE. Well, not only unit testing can be executed with the latter but also, TestDriven.NET can be also used again since version 2.5 (still in beta stages). However, from time to time we may found some exceptions with tests related to the content pipeline. Henning Degn explains us why and also brings a simple workaround to that issue.

From Degn's article: "... Some tests in XNA cannot be done dynamically. These tests usually require visual inspection and therefore need to be run manually. Using Testdriven.net you can run test scenarios, simply using an ad hoc test of a function containing the test. Simple. Effective. No need to modify the main method to run these functions.

However, when using any XNA content I have stumbled on the following error:

Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.ContentLoadException
File not found. ---> System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException:
Could not find a part of the path 'C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_32\Microsoft.Xna.Framework\1.0.0.0__6d5c3888ef60e27d\Content\myTexture.xnb'

The reason being that (naturally) I didn’t put my content inside the GAC (Global Assembly Cache)! The ContentManager is using the codebase of the assembly who’s main method called it as its root ...".

BTW, in some chapter of Benny's book it's stated that this tool cannot be used with XNA GSE. Please notice that by the time the book was written, v2.5 beta -the build that reimplmented support for express editions- hadn't been released.

Cheers!

"STENCIL SWIPES"

Shawn Hargreaves has published the third part of the series that cover "transitions", this time centering attention on the use of stencil buffers to produce some nice effects.

From the post: "... Stencil is usually an 8 bit integer value, and is attached to each pixel in addition to the usual color and depth values. You can set renderstates to control how values are written into the stencil buffer while drawing graphics, and also to specify that graphics should only be drawn in areas where the existing stencil values meet specified conditions ...".

Consice, accurate and practical. The best part on the series so far, imho of course ... cheers!