As reported by far too many sites to list Amazon are now listing Vista and reporting a January 30th release date. Of course this date may well be a temporary date in order to have it listed so that it can be ordered as this happens with a lot of DVDs and games that are highly anticipated. Irrespective of the actual release date Vista is going to happen next year and so is MacOS Tiger. Lets be honest here: both OSs have features which are catching up with each other and both OSs also have features that are great strides over the other in that area. Nobody...

This week sees the release of XNA and while it's not yet ready for the XBox the games you write will work on the PC and so I'm beginning to wonder who is going to start churning out code. The thing is that most people are talking about new developers and new games, but I don't think that we should discount the existing code out thre on the web. The biggest and quickest source of games will be open source projects like ScummVM. It would be great if somebody ported that to the XBox and so I suspect that somebody will do...

With the upcoming release of XNA I'm beginning to wonder where I stand with DirectX. I code with C# and we currently use Managed DirectX 1 in order to provide some 3D and sound related tasks. Lucky for us we didn't go down the MDX 2 route because we would have been shafted, what with it's being canned before the end of the beta and all. What really worries me is that XNA is marketted as a game framework. We don't write games, we write high performance visualisation software and so when we're playing audio we're decoding it from an obscure...

We've been using Team Foundation Server for a long time now and we're getting to a point where we need to start using it a bit more seriously to support some changes in the project. This is probably a good time to make some some more comments on our experience so far. 1. Reliability. Reliability is the most important feature you need when dealing with source control and all in all it's been a good experience so far. Server uptime has been 100% and although we have had a couple of funnies with looks like an issue with times being...

The reaction to this announcement about a special version of Visual Studio called XNA Game Studio Express has not exactly lit the world on fire. On the plus side there's the fact that you can write software for your XBox 360 and run it without any hassles. On the down side there's the fact that it's not going to be able to use the full power of the platform because you're running on .NET (you can get pretty close to full speed with .NET, but it takes knowing exactly what you're doing) and you can only distribute your games as source...

This is a quick test of Live Writer to see if it works with my blog. edit: Can't edit posts to correct spelling errors. I really need to upgrade from .Text sometime soon.

Here's a bunch of random comments that I've been thinking about recently. None of them really merit a whole post on their own so here's a brain dump. Vista still looks like a good OS, certainly much better than XP. I want a Mac Pro. If I put all 4 graphics cards in it then can XP use them? I've never tried multiple PCI Express graphics cards before. Yesterday's Jobs keynote was at an Apple developer event. All of the OSX announcements were always going to be more interesting to developers (except for the hardware announcements) so why are people complaining about things...