I NEED YOUR HELP, GUYS!

As you may know, a few days ago I submitted an article entitled "XNA & Beyond: The Path To VS 2008" to The Code Project site.

Well, the article has entered TCP's VS 2008 Compo, where 3 out 5 finalists have been already announced and in a couple of weeks the remaining 2 places will be assigned for sure.

Why do I need help? As time goes by, in order to improve my chances to make it into the finals I need more votes, so if you feel like it, can and want to help me, just read the article and cast your extremely high votes ;)

It seems that Silverlight-based articles are the ones that bring more attention to readers and voters, and XNA ones are just left behind. Are we going to allow this? I repeat: Are we going to allow this???!!!!

By the way, thanks a lot to the ZMan, Ziggyware, Gamedevkicks, and the folks on the IRC channel for their support as well as all of you who have already voted for my article.

Cheers!

[Damn! I feel like a politician during an elections campaign ...]

XNA & BEYOND: THE PATH TO VS 2008

I have uploaded my first article to "The Code Project" site, which shows how to integrate an XNA-based application into VS 2008 (an implementation for WPF is included) ... read it here.

Also in the article I present -what I think is- a simple solution for embedding your XNA games within a WinForms control; a topic that has been heavily discussed in the (XNA Creators) forums these days.

I hope you find it useful.

Cheers!

PROBLEMS INSTALLING "NET RUMBLE" STARTER KIT

Well, having installed XNA GS 2.0, I then downloaded and install the Net Rumble Starter Kit. The process ended without problems so everything looked ok so far.

For my surprise, when I opened VS 2005 Express and attempted to create a new project based on that kit, I found the kit wasn't shown in the IDE's projects browser.

The template was installed under this folder:

(myOSDriveLetter)/Users/(myUserName)/Documents/Visual Studio 2005/Templates/ProjectTemplates/Visual C#

... but still the IDE didn't notice it at all.

At first I thought it had something to do with the fact that I'm using a non-english version of the IDE and a non-english version of Vista 32-Bit (something similar to what it's commented here: see section 1.2.2), but I cannot set the "International Settings" to "English" since, in my case, everything is in Spanish.

So, what to do? After locating the "SpaceWar" Stater Kit template file, I found that both, PC and 360 versions, where installed under a folder named "XNA Game Studio 2.0".

So, I created a new folder under ".../ProjectsTemplates/Visual C#", then renamed it to "XNA Game Studio 2.0", finally moved the "Net Rumble" template file to that folder, and presto!

Cheers!