THE GAMEFEST HAS BEEN GREAT SO FAR

Oh man, I'm really excited of having travelled this far to get to Seattle's Gamefest.

I've been talking with many different people (peers, MSFties, MS partners, exhibitors, etc.), giving and collecting cards like crazy, and played a lot of games. In short, having a really quality time.

In this sense, meeting the guys behind XNA GS have been really nice: Shawn, Eli, Michael, and the rest of the guys. Also cool Xna'ers like Chad Carter, Bill Reiss, and of course, "old" XNA'ers (and ex-MSFTies) like TheZMan (Andy).

Also it has been a great opportunity to discuss some crazy ideas and techniques that I have and of course want to implement in the near future, and believe me when I say that the feedback has been encouraging (thanks Shawn).

The talks have been quite handy. Lots of techniques, upcoming features, relevant information, and of course: the yummy 70% that we "indies" could get if we reach the next phase with our games.

So, guys, tomorrow I'll be returning to Vancouver with my wife and sister, so maybe I can post more comments about the conference.

Opps. Have to go. The next talk is starting.

See ya.

MY FIRST DAY IN VANCOUVER ...

... Well, actually in Canada.

My wife and I are visiting my sister and brother-in-law who both live in Vancouver, BC. After 30 hours of flights we finally got to Seattle where they were waiting for us. Then we have like 4 more hours to travel by car until we finally got to Vancouver.

All our flights were delayed with the exception of the first one, so we had to wait ... we missed one local flight in the US ... we were rebooked by the company ... more wait ... lost our luggage in one of the connecting flights ... finally found it on destination on the baggage claim, you know ... the usual stuff with long-international flights.

In the end, it was an interesting experience, specially for my wife, since it is the first time she leaves the Southamerican continent. For me, I have travelled around the world so I'm accustomed to deal with delays, connections, baggage, etc. Actually, I kinda missed it.

Next monday, I'm going to Seattle and attend the Gamefest for the first time. I'm really excited.

So guys I hope to meet you there.

VS 2008 & .NET 3.5 SP 1 BETA RELEASES

I was reading Scott Guthried's blog this morning so I found a great surprise: the first Service Pack beta release for both, Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 is out.

One of the things that amazed me while reading through the new features we'll find in the final release has the following title: "WPF Interoperability with Direct3D".

But why does this means a lot to me -or should mean a lot to us XNA-based game developers?

If you ever attempted to integrate a D3D-based game/application into a WPF-based project, you may know that one of the hard burdens to surpass to get that job done is called "Airspace", a strict rule that prevents both type of applications to co-exist in the same region of the screen, at least without a simple solution.

And I say simple here because to "bend" this rule a little bit to make the user believe that a real integration exists -meaning, as if there was not Airspace at all in the first place- either you had to use a decorator-pattern-based implementation or a solution where you intercept all windows messages in order to "bake" all pixels rendered by D3D into an image that can be later used by any WPF control ... if you want to know more about this rule and or get one of these solutions or both of them just do a simple Internet search with the words "DirectX WPF Airspace" :)

Well, as this is becoming a built-in feature now, it means that we can stop worrying about finding or choosing the optimum way to integrate D3D and WPF, what in turn means that we don't have to constraint our D3D-based projects to WinForms controls anymore and thus we can let our imagination fly to create a rock-solid kicking @$$ game-level editor using WPF and XNA -specially now that GS 3 integrates into VS2008.

Really great news ... although we have to wait a bit more to get our hands on this feature until the final SP is released ... :)

Cheers!
Pete