I watched quite a lot of PDC 2008 Talks this week and I really like that they put all that stuff online for everyone to watch. To learn more about the PDC, check out event photos or see all the sessions, directly go to http://www.microsoftpdc.com/. Another good list of all sessions can be found here: http://coolthingoftheday.blogspot.com/2008/10/pdc2008-quick-video-link-list.html

Here are my personal favorite session recordings (from what I have seen, I have not seen all talks):

The Future of C# (by Anders Hejlsberg)
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL16/
As always Anders is fun to watch and you learn a lot about C#, the new dynamic keywords and whats to come. Not really stuff you will probably use right now, but good to know what we can do and probably will do in a few years. In case you want to watch IronPython or IronRuby, this session is a good prerequisite too.

Deep Dive: Dynamic Languages in Microsoft .NET
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL10/
Jim Hugunin (the creator of IronPython and DLR) talks about IronPython and the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) in general. Fun to watch, interesting insights and generally always interesting to anyone interesting in dynamic languages.

Panel: The Future of Programming Languages
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL57/
I like Panels like this and they had really great guests: Gilad Bracha, Douglas Crockford, Anders Hejlsberg, Erik Meijer, Wolfram Schulte, Jeremy Siek. They get a little bit off-topic at the end, but overall an interesting and very fun to watch discussion with a lot of interesting arguments on all sides (lot of different languages are discussed).

IronRuby: The Right Language for the Right Job
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL44/
I have learned Ruby few months ago and used it for a few days, but I never really liked it and continued to use Python instead, but John Lam (the IronRuby inventor) is a cool dude and give a lot of tips and shows off a lot of cool demos, which are equally interesting even if you would use some other dynamic language than Ruby.

Microsoft Visual C# IDE: Tips and Tricks
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL46/
Interesting and useful Tricks, Dustin shows off a lot of shortcuts and the whole presentation is in Visual Studio, which is cool.

Visual Studio Debugger Tips & Tricks
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL59/
I like Tips & Tricks talks and this one is good too. Informative and fun to watch as well. I will probably watch it again some time soon, like I will with some of the other talks too (because I usually code or do something else while the videos are running on a secondary monitor ^^).

Mono and .NET (by Miguel de Icaza)
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC54/
One of the last talks I discovered after watching many other talks. At first I thought this might be not really interesting for me, since this will probably focus only on Linux and Mono development, but I could not be more wrong. This was a really great talk, Miguel is such a great presenter, even when things go wrong, he makes fun remarks and is always on the topic. He gives great insight of game programming on Mono for Linux, the Mac and even the iPhone, which sounded really cool to me. Other topics were also interesting and fascinating.

Managed Extensibility Framework: Overview
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL33/
If you were every interesting in extending Visual Studio or want to hear about good ideas on how to extend frameworks or applications, this talk is helpful and insightful.

Visual C++: 10 is the New 6
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL13/
I'm not doing much C++ coding anymore, but many years ago this was my main programming language and it is still the most used language for games. This talk is highly informative and Boris Jabes talks in detail about new C++ Features in VS2010 and what is possible, what will get better and what even features will come in the future after VS2010. Also a lot of interesting questions and answers at the end.

The two talks Parallel Programming for C++ and Parallel Programming for Managed Developers were also highly informative and gave us programmers some good ideas on how to make better use of Multi-core systems. I especially like the Talk Parallel Library (TPL), which is insanely easy to use:

Parallel.For(0, 100, i => a[i] = a[i] * a[i]);

Microsoft XNA Game Studio: An Overview
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL43/
Frank Savage from the XNA Team talks about XNA Game Studio 3.0, which is highly informative if you don't know much about XNA yet. For me there was not much new to learn in this talk, but Frank is such a cool guy and it is fun to watch how he presents his stuff, which is one more reason to watch this talk. He also shows off some XNA games and the recently XNA Dream Build Play contest winner games.

The keynotes from Day 1 (Azure, Infos) and Day 2 (Windows 7, Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4) were also interesting to watch. Other sessions sounded also interested and from what I have seen Oslo, Azure, Silverlight, Unit Testing in VS2010 and other new stuff is cool too, but I have no plans to use that stuff anytime soon (maybe Oslo for parsing text, which is easy and cool).

I hope you enjoy these videos as much as I do, definitely a great idea to put them all online :)

Since I'm not posting many XNA articles lately, lets announce some stuff from Ziggyware :)

Ziggyware Fall 2008 XNA Article Contest


Start date: October 12'th 2008
Ending Date: November 30'th. (Midnight CST)

Contest Subjects

• Write an XNA related tutorial for XNA developers (see examples)

Important: Read How to create an article for Ziggyware - Entries are subject to approval and may be disqualified per disgression.

Prizes

• First Place
  • XBox 360 Elite (USA NTSC)
  • One Year subscription to the Microsoft XNA Creators Club
• Second Place
  • One Year subscription to the Microsoft XNA Creators Club

More information can found at Ziggyware.com:
http://www.ziggyware.com/news.php?readmore=905

Hi Folks, sorry for not updating my blog for such a long time. I basically had no time and not much interesting to report. Since I will focus more on game programming again in the near future, more blogging might happen again :)

Anyway, yesterday I was an interview partner on a German TV show called "neues", which can be seen on TV Sundays each week at 16:30 (4:30 PM). The topic is user generated content and I will answer some questions in the second half of the show. Since the show is not technical, it might not be of much interest for game developers, but hopefully the general public can learn a bit about XNA and the cool opportunities everyone has with developing games on their Xbox 360 or Windows PC.

It was a very interesting experience seeing how a show gets created, how many people are involved and how often it is rerecorded until everyone is happy. The people at ZDF/3sat were also very nice and it was fun to work with them.

The show will also be available on the 3sat video archive online (probably in the next few days):
http://www.3sat.de/mediathek/mediathek.php?query=*&red=neues&mode=search

Update 2008-09-14: Direct link to the video from the 3sat mediathek:
http://www.3sat.de/mediathek/?obj=9543

Some pics from my journey to Mainz where the TV show was recorded. It was quite a long trip taking about 5 hours reaching Mainz. At Frankfurt I moved from the ICE (fast train, but the power supply did not work so I could not even use my laptop, grr) to a slower train called RE (which does not supply any power to the train riders).


The weather was not very enjoyable Friday. In the morning it was raining very much.


Since I was not allowed to take any pictures inside the studio and due the bad weather I took not many photos. Hopefully I can post a small video once the 3sat video from the show is available.


Getting back home was the same ride in reverse. I did not spend much time in Mainz or Frankfurt due the bad weather and I was kinda tired so I played a few games I wanted to check out (like Spore and Space Siege) in the train. This ICE at Mainz was going in the opposite direction, seems like not many ICE trains drive from Mainz to Frankfurt, so I had to take a slow RE train again.


And finally in Frankfurt at the MUCH bigger train station. They have about 30 rail tracks there and you can see a lot of people wearing business suits. Probably all bankers and investors, hehe ^^

Okay, that's it. Maybe I will finish up some blog posts I have written in the last months, but never finished them due lack of time and motivation. Take care!

As you can read on Scott Guthrie's Blog the Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta can be downloaded now. It has a amazing set of features and improvements and I highly recommend it, especially if you live on the bleeding edge :) I like the VS IDE and ASP.NET Routing Engine (previously part of the new ASP.NET MVC framework) the most.

David Hayden has summarized the list of changes (Scott's Blog posts are usually very long ^^):

• ASP.NET Dynamic Data -  The wonderful ASP.NET RAD Data Scaffolding Support similar to what you get from Ruby on Rails.
• ASP.NET Routing Engine - The routing engine we have been enjoying in the ASP.NET MVC Framework and ASP.NET Dynamic Data.
• ASP.NET AJAX Back/Forward Button History Support - What you know and love from the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions
• ASP.NET AJAX Script Combining Support - Haven't seen this one before. It allows you to declaratively define multiple script references within a new custom tag.
• Visual Studio 2008 Performance Improvements HTML Designer and HTML Source Editor - Always good to see :)
• Visual Studio 2008 JavaScript Script Formatting and Code Preferences
• Better Visual Studio Javascript Intellisense for Multiple Javascript/AJAX Frameworks - This will help with jQuery, cool!
• Visual Studio Refactoring Support for WCF Services in ASP.NET Projects
• Visual Studio Support for Classic ASP Intellisense and Debugging - Need this for ASP.NET MVC Framework Views.
• Visual Web Developer Express Edition support for Class Library and Web Application Projects
• SQL Server 2008 Support
• ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities - We expected this. Awesome!
• ADO.NET Data Services (formerly code-named "Astoria") - This is awesome, too!
• C# - The C# code editor now identifies and displays red squiggle errors for many semantic code issues that previously required an explicit compilation to identify. Every little bit helps.

Read all this in more detail on Scott's blog or just download VS2008 SP1 Beta.

As you can read on the XNA Team Blog the first CTP (kinda early beta/alpha) for XNA Game Studio 3.0 is available for download now.
The major new features beside full VS 2008 (Express, Standard, Pro, etc., but not longer VS 2005) support you can now write and deploy games for the Zune. Luckily for me I own one (not many non-US people do since the Zune is ONLY available in the US). Please note that while the Zune is a powerful device it obviously will NOT support any advanced rendering techniques at all, but all the other parts of the XNA Framework are supported very well. This means 3D games or shader based games will be possible on the Zune and the display is just 320x240 pixel and there are other things you have to think about (controls and playing music), but other than that it should be pretty easy to start developing Zune games right away :)

While the new features are really cool and I definitely will check out the Zune development options (XNA MVPs already saw some cool samples and stuff at the MVP Summit about this ^^), the show stopper for me is the "no 64 bit support" issue. All my PCs (work, home, laptop and even the servers) run on 64 bit vista/win2003/win2008, it will not be easy to play around with XNA 3.0 ("Hey, go away from that PC, I wanna test something").

Anyway, check out XNA Game Studio 3.0, especially if you own a Zune and find this Zune-targeted game development cool. Other features worth checking out are better sound APIs in the new Media namespace, namely the SoundEffect and MediaPlayer APIs. They allow you to play sounds and music much easier and in more formats (yeah, mp3s).

I worked on the CR_Commenter v1.8 Update all weekend and tested it a little bit today at work. If you do not know about the CR_Commenter plugin for CodeRush yet (I originally wrote it back in 2004 and still use it every single day), please read this article of version 1.7 from 2006 or check out the original Commenter - A CodeRush plugin which helps you to comment your code article on CodeProject.net from 2004

Here are the coolest new features in v1.8:

• New and updated hotkeys, also made sure all of them work as advertised! You can also now switch on and off much more features and hotkeys if you like (e.g. disable Ctrl+1, Ctrl+3 or Ctrl+.). Normally the commenter will do his work every time you press '}' while coding and automatically add comments, xml blocks and the header (no need for any hotkeys during normal coding). But you can also press the following hotkeys to perform special actions:
  
  
  • Ctrl+1: Does perform the same action as closing a block with '}', but can be used anywhere inside a method or class.
    
    
  • Ctrl+2 or Ctrl+.: Adds a namespace for the current word at the cursor. Used to support automatically adding a namespace in C# 3.0 (back in v1.7), but now works the same way as VS 2008 plus saving you from pressing Enter to accept a namespace suggestion. If you like the VS2008 way better (allowing different namespaces), just disable Ctrl+. and VS will work as before.
    
    
  • Ctrl+3 or Ctrl+R: Auto generate region around the current block (method, property, constructor, etc.), for selections use Ctrl+R. You can also press Shift+Ctrl+3 to process the whole file! This feature was originally added in CodeRush v1.5, but abandoned in v1.6 and v1.7 after CodeRush supported it internally. Now the feature is back with lots of improvements, auto generating regions all over the place and producing region names for you. Can of course be disabled if you like the CodeRush way better (having to type the region name yourself).
    
    
  • Ctrl+4: Toggle collapsing and expanding current selection. This feature often caused trouble in v1.7 because it collapsed sometimes regions you were working in (e.g. method blocks with sub regions), now it will not longer disrupt your work and never close any region you are working on (except you want to with this hotkey).
    
    
  • Ctrl+5: Toggle collapsing and expanding everything at top level. Very cool to quickly check out what this file is about, use it in conjunction with first generating all region blocks (Shift+Ctrl+3).
    
    
  • Ctrl+6: Update all comments and xml blocks for the whole file. Was Ctrl+9 before and Ctrl+F9 even before that, this method is not required very often because Ctrl+1 handles most of this already. Please also note that Ctrl+7 was abondoned for now (resort language blocks and regions) because this feature is very complex and not implemented yet (see above for v2.0).
    
    
  • Ctrl+9 or Ctrl+F9: Generate all unit tests automatically for us (I use F9 to test, Ctrl+F9 makes sense to generate tests)! This will add a sub class called Tests, which contains all public methods as tests, which will all fail by default. Then all unit tests will have to be written and tested until everything is implemented correctly. Existing test methods will not be overwritten! This features is the major improvement in v1.8 for me, it will add unit tests automatically for us at the bottom of file to provide 100% code coverage (all unit tests should fail initially, add and change code to make them work).
    
    
• Thought about auto sorting and removing namespaces for all files, but that works just fine with the new VS2008 Powertools.
  
  
• Fixed '}' inside string or comment, even if CodeRush has not processed the whole file yet (double checking now). E.g. the following string will not longer produce any comments:
  SQL = String.Format("UPDATE GC SET Status = {0} WHERE ID = {1}", Msg, ID);
  
  
• Added option to not update comments on } (or Ctrl+1)
  
  
• Supporting to generate regions again, but split up function names, also suppress CodeRush region generation with Ctrl+3, Ctrl+R (also suppressing VS hotkeys now) Better support for auto generated region blocks for big methods, just press Ctrl+3 to generate region (let CR_Commenter choose the name automatically, allow editing after pressing Ctrl+3).
  
  
• Press Shift+Ctrl+3 to generate all regions at once for the whole file! The commenter will also not longer produce regions were you already have some (even if they are different), especially if you press Ctrl+3 multiple times you will see what I mean ^^.
  
  
• Fixed #if DEBUG in Using directives (caused trouble, was removed)
  
  
• Also added code to always remove #if DEBUG and #endif, especially at the beginning and end of the Using directives region
  
  
• Fixed double line #using Using directives issue when using directives got mixed up.
  
  
• Fixed long line commenter generation, will now still work, but not longer cut of any of your code. If you have long code lines (>100 letters), you can still generate comments for them and the Commenter will not longer cut anything off (you are responsible for formating the code).
  
  
• Fixed auto-collapsing of regions, especially when closing blocks in methods, the method should not auto-collapse!
  
  
• Checked support with other languages (which are at least similar to C#) like Lua, Python, etc.
  
  
• In Python/Lua, etc. we had to disable } comment generation and also use other comments (# for python, -- for lua) when using Ctrl+1 for header generation.
  
  
• Test all other hotkeys and make sure they do not affect the code badly in CodeRush unsupported languages (note: VB is still not supported since it is very different from c# code).
  
  
• Supports now any unit test framework, actually does not care anymore what you use, only the unit test generation code will add Xunit, but you can easily change that code if you want to.
  
  
• Options are now available directly into Editor tree of the CodeRush options!
  
  
• Refactored all classes, added about 4 new classes and removed 1 unused class. The source code is now much easier to read, to follow and to change.
  
  
• Remove commented out code, cleaned up the source code a lot.
  
  
• And finally applied the commenter to the commenter source code :)

Some cool and highly complex ideas (like the auto refactoring and resorting of all code elements in a file) did not make it into v1.8 and will probably lay on ice for a while until I start developing CR_Commenter v2.0. But other than that I'm pretty happy with the new version and both the new region generation code and the new unit test generation code is really helpful, plus the many fixes and improvements of existing features make it more enjoyable to use CR_Commenter.

Download CR_Commenter v1.8 here (free as usual, you will need DXCore, which you can download here freely):

• Click here to download the installer: CR_Commenter.exe v1.8 (95 kB)
  
  
• And here is the sourcecode for: CR_Commenter_src.zip v1.8 (90 kB)
  
  

This is the final post of my picture set (7 Days of posting pictures, uff). Nothing much happened on Friday. I just woke up in the hotel, posted the Thursday post, watched some more GOM TV StarCraft Videos and finally left to the Seattle Airport. My camera batteries were depleted and most of the pictures were not recorded because of that. From time to time I was able to shake the batteries enough to make one or two pictures ^^

I hope this is not the plane that will take me all the way back to Europe :)	After basically just walking over to the gate the plane was not there yet. I expected one or two hours of security checks and waiting like in the past, but it took maybe five or ten minutes to walk through that. Strange .. maybe it was early or just luck.	Ah, there is my plane. My laptop batteries are almost dead by now and I will read the book I brought along (Digital Fortress). Sleeping in the plane is not an option, way too uncomfortable and too noisy.
Bad weather in Frankfurt - Germany. We slided quite a bit on the water on the runway. By now it is actually Saturday because of the 10 hour flight plus the 9 hours time difference.	Cool secret underground tunnel. The airport was so packed, it took over an hour to get to the security and finally reach my gate just in time. And all that stress just to find out that my plane to Hamburg has not arrived yet and will be 30 minutes late.	Finally reaching Hamburg Airport (looks much smaller, doesn't it?). It is about 1:00 PM here now and I'm awake for 18 hours now.
Not only is Hamburg Airport much smaller, there are no train connections. You have to take a bus first and then drive all around the city. Next time I will probably take the Airport Express Bus, which drives directly to Hamburg Hauptbahnhof (main train station). It is quicker to get back home from there for me.

I hope you enjoyed my pictures. Sorry for any misspellings I might have made, just contact me to fix links or names. Most of the time I wrote the text in a bus ride or while listening to a session. Next I will probably blog a little bit about ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight and/or IronPython.

Thursday was the last day of the MVP Summit and the closing keynotes by Ray Ozzie and Steve Balmer were in the Seattle Convention Center again. Additional sessions were hold in the hotels later that day.

After eating some breakfast it was time for the final keynotes.	Ray Ozzie told us how great we are and told some not so exciting development and technology stories. Maybe it was still too early to listen to anything but jokes.	A short break and preparing the mind for the upcoming Steve Balmer speech.
The weather outside is as usual. I guess I was really lucky last Saturday, which was the nicest day wheaterwise I had all year.	Say hello to Steve Balmer.	Steve is moving so fast and always so excited about everything, it is hard to take a still picture of him.
Mr. Balmer is wondering about Microsoft's Strategy? Not really, he is just straching his head :)	Looks like he is giving up on the Online Business ^^ He was actually talking about the fact that Microsoft is only number 3 in Online Search. But as much as he wishes to change that I predict Google will be on the top for a long time to come.	Now that is a lot of products!
Time for some questions.	Poor Steve did not only have to answer 3 Sharepoint/Groove questions in a row, but then the Canadians went crazy once again and demanded that he will wear a stupid shirt like the rest of the Canadians.	Which Steve Balmer actually went along with ^^ Some questions were really stupid now, but Steve stayed cool and always had funny remarks.
More gifts for Balmer!	And this is what he looked like at the end. Well, it was a nice MVP Summit and most sessions and keynotes were exciting and fun to watch.	Time to get up and eat some lunch. But it is only 11:30, why eat lunch already .. crazy.
Still about 1700 MVPs around.	The Canadians couldn't stop making noise and drawing attention. Time for a final group photo. Other MVPs told me that this is not the first time they acted that strange and it was not funny anymore. Just stay normal guys, this is not a sporting event.	At lunch all the XNA/DirectX MVPs meet for a last time. We put 2 tables together and relaxed for a while until it was time to eat lunch.
Someone is taking a picture of us. I guess Andy Dunn will upload his pictures somewhere too, I will check out his blog later.	A lot of Asian guys were also taking pictures of themselfs :)	Saying bye to Pat and Andy Dunn and Andys Camera :)
Leaving the Conference area for the last time. Still only XNA/DirectX MVPs on this photo.	Nick Gravelyn is telling us about his next 100 game ideas.	And George Clingerman, Catalin Zima and me are listening.
And one optinoal session I attended to in the afternoon at the hotel. It was about the VS Debugger and VS 2008 SP1 and was very informative and exciting. Especially through the fact that the audience was quite loud about known bugs and issues we have every day.

Good. I made it, time for me to leave to the airport now. It will be a long trip back. It was a nice time here in Seattle, but I will be glad to be home again and not having to type on my laptop keyboard anymore :)