Thursday, February 21, 2008

XNA GS 3: THE LUCKY NUMBER!

Being an old timer, it's incredible to see how fascinating the world of XNA is moving ahead. Since Managed DX first appeared, there also appeared the first steps of a big company to introduce C#, and managed code in general, into the game-development industry.

After all the uncertainty around the future of managed code in games when the doom of MDX 2 was unveiled -specially for all us who had embraced c# and MDX for our game projects, a new word started to being rumored with higher and higher strength: XNA.

Since the first beta of XNA GS was released, this baby has been growing up at a steady and solid pace. In fact, with this recent great announcement, MS has confirmed that is betting a hugh stake on the project and if you ask me, it's a winner bet. Other big companies are trying to copycat the idea, but they aren't moving that fast and that well, plus they're still attached to C++ ... and I love C#!

Being an indie, knowing that in a few months I'll have the possibility to sell my games for the XBox 360 as well as produce games for Zune is really exciting. It's very difficult and expensive to make a game project to reach the "going gold" phase, and MS way may prove to be an affordable means to show off our creations, get a contract with a publisher and why not, directly sell our games with an interesting profit, why not?

I don't know about you, but I was waiting to hear (or read) something like this all these years. Thumbs up for the XNA Team! Way to go ...

Cheers!

Monday, January 14, 2008

KUDOS FOR THE WINNERS!

The winners of The Code Project's "Visual Studio 2008 Competition" have been announced:
  1. Legion : Build your own virtual super computer with Silverlight by Daniel Vaughan, and
  2. Silverlight 1.1 Fun and Games by Sacha Barber.

In addition to the prizes for finalists, these guys will receive $10k and $2k, respectively.

Congrats guys!

Monday, January 07, 2008

MY ARTICLE IS ON THE FINALS!!!

Someone pinch me please since I must be dreaming ... I made it into the finals !!!

I would like to thank all the readers that supported my article "XNA & Beyond: The Path To VS 2008". I really appreciate your comments, your messages and your votes.

Also, thanks a lot to the judges for picking my article and of course, The Code Project team. I cannot express in words how happy I am, but trust me when I say this emotion is huge.

And what can I comment about Visual Studio 2008? Best of the best ... it rules!

Finally, I would like to thank the XNA Team for giving us this incredible framework that is getting better and better as we speak: XNA Game Studio.

Well, I don't know whether I'll get beyond this nomination to the finals, but having reached this far gives me renewed energy to keep on writing articles.

Happy new year 2008 everybody!!! This is a great way for me to start the year :)

Cheers!
Pete