Steve Workman

If you didn’t know already, Microsoft officially released Windows Vista yesterday. I’ve been running Vista for 2 months now, and in that time it I’ve seen some major performance improvements, mostly thanks to new drivers.

Yesterday, I knew it was launch day because windows update tagged 9 new downloads for me. 6 patches for Vista (including one that wasn’t optional), a texas hold’em poker game for Vista Ultimate users (which isn’t too bad once you get used to it, textures are a bit off though) and Visual Studio 2005 SP1 for pro and express (I have express installed for XNA studio). Overall improvement to Vista: minimal. Most of the speed boosts will come from drivers, just have a look what a good video card driver can do in this ATI/nVidia test: link

In other news, I’ve started up Uni-Sport development again, this time on rails. Struggling with this new language reminds me of my first forray into PHP almost 2 and a half years ago. In two days I have created a small application that reads RSS feeds, sorts them by date and displays them. Two days, for that! It seems that this agile framework isn’t so agile really, or is it just that I spent most of my day assuming that rails wrote accessors and mutators for me.

Anyway, this small section is rather flexible and will become part of the portal site which will eventually reside at http://shef.uni-sport.org. This will aggregate news/events/results from around the network. It’ll do it all in a funky AJAX-enabled way too with flashy prototype effects. Depending upon how bored i get in the next few days I’ll be debuting it very soon.

Finally, I’m off to Designertopia today, courtesy of Microsoft, so I’ll give you an update of what I learned from that then. It should be good, I’m looking to pick up design tips from the best, and I’ll pass them on. It’s a service, I know. :-)

Steve

Currently Listening to: Bloc Party - A Weekend in the City (words cannot express how good this record is)
Currently Reading: Agile Web Dev with Rails 2nd Ed
Currently Watching: the world go by
Currently Eating: Lamb korma
Days until next interview: 5 (phone with Fujitsu services)

So, Microsoft and their DirectX team, being the geniuses that they are, have come up with a new product, XNA Studio Express which is rather good. I went to the launch event at Warwick uni thru the MSP programme. Here’s what I learnt.

1. XNA is a great technology
The demos that they showed were amazing. Literally, 5 lines of code got some components loaded and everything sorted for windows or Xbox 360 and you’ve got a spinning cube lit with phong shading. All this ease makes you able to focus on gameplay instead of fiddling around with rendering modes etc. Also, the ability to compile for either Xbox or windows with a few minor chanegs is amazing.

2. Peter Molenyeux is a great man
He really knows his onions. He’s a great speaker and has a clear vision. It’s all about positivity and drive. Playing about with something until its fun, concentrating on the gameplay rather than graphics or using the physics to make gameplay features.

3. If you want to develop games, you MUST know C++
Talking to the people at Rare, Microsoft and Peter, they all said, you’ll still need to know it for the next 5 years. XNA is great, C# is one of the easiest languages to learn ever, BUT, you can’t get all the hardware access (apparently, XNA is 95% of the XDK (Xbox dev toolkit. It’s currently missing the networking layer)) and pointers are essential if you’re really pushing the envelope of what it can do. Until the CLR is at 99% of C++ native performance and XNA allows full hardware access, people won’t change. Apparently, using XNA, the games at the moment are CPU limited rather than GPU limited. PPC cores were never really good for games :D

4. Academics should not be allowed to be funny
They are not funny, the best joke had the punchline “why the long face”

5. I want an Xbox 360
But apparently, Santa can’t fit one in his sack. Lousy santa

Steve

First, a little bit of news.

Playing hockey today, I got hit by the ball just to the left of my eye, 4 stitches and a monsterous bruise have seen that I won’t be playing for a week or so. It happens.

So, whilst I’ve been at home, I’ve been playing with my new copy of Windows Vista Ultimate… well…

Firstly, It’s a big improvement over XP. Really, it is. It’s the first time I’ve wanted to use the new start menu. The desktop searching is excellent and works far better than on OS X. Aero is fun but it’s not as good as Apple’s Expose feature which I really hope will be made an add-on by some bedroom coder sometime soon.

The bad things…. The sidebar, whilst nice, isn’t as amazing as the OS X dashboard. It’s alright, but not brilliant. Driver support at this time is pretty poop. I’m running with RC1/2 drivers and my sound is dodgy (Audigy 2 ZS card). Graphics seem fine (Geforce 6800GT) but I tried to run a dvd and firstly, it played without sound (re-installing the drivers 3 times sorted that :-s) and now it jerks and just isn’t worthwhile (this worked fine in RC1). The zip file extraction algorithm is awful. It took 3 minutes to extract 8.8Mb of files. Also, I was expecting the Windows Sync center to be able to perhaps sync with Office 2004 Mac… nope, it definitly doesn’t do that… still not worked out exactly what it does!

Office 2007 IS everything they said it would be though. Love it to bits. So, I’ll keep hunting for drivers (most of which will be out in January) so until then I’ll play dvds on my laptop!

 Steve

There are a number of benefits to being a Microsoft Student Partner. You get to learn about the new stuff before anyone else, you get to attend conferences and product launches (XNA Studio launch December 13th @ Warwick Uni), you get free stuff like t-shirts, laptop bags and USB pens, but the best thing of all is your MSDN Premium subscription.

I recieved mine in the post today and honestly, I knew MS made a lot of software, but I didn’t know they made this much! The first shipment contained 23 DVDs with every server, operating system (Vista RTM didn’t make the November edition), application (Nor did Office 2007 RTM) and the whole library. They’ve even included Virtual PC Mac (but not Office 2004 Mac). I am well and truly amazed at it.

So, after downloading Vista for 2 hours today I’ll be installing it tomorrow. I’ll let you know how it goes, how easy it is etc but for a brief guide, see www.winsupersite.com

Steve
Currently Listening to: Muse
Currently Watching: Scrubs Series 6
Currently Eating: Anna’s Birthday Cake
Currently Reading: xmas present lists
Days til xmas: 24