Because I'm sure that everybody uses my opinions to base their own on (or was that nobody?) here's a quick roundup of things that I've decided are good at the moment. 1. XBox 360 Since I caved in and brought an XBox in order to kill zombies and save the galaxy from oppression (among other things) I've been getting back into console gaming after a stint of pure PC games. Ignoring the great graphics and games the XBox 360 has some really nice features. It works as a media center extender, which doesn't effect me as I use a Mac and Frontrow as...

Last night my brother gave me his comments on XNA after having tried to use it for a full day. The API and usability are very good, but the experience is bitterly let down by the documentation at this stage. The examples contain errors that, OK, I can fix but only because I know enough about how DirectX works in the first place in order to make the fixes but if you don't then you're pretty much stuffed. The rest of the documentation is unfinished and missing pages and methods which makes exploring the API hard if you don't have...

My brother is an animator who dabbles in writing small game type things in his spare time using tools such as QBasic. Before when I've asked him why he doesn't move up to .NET or C++ he's always said that they're too complicated and need too much learning when all he wants to do is play and make versions of Dizzy and Raycasters (the type of engine behind Doom 1+2 for people to young to remember before real 3D). Yesterday I gave him XNA express, my wired XBox 360 controller and showed him the help file. After a bit of coaching about C#...

Apple has announced a new 24" iMac that looks pretty good, but I've been looking at the lower end of the market. The top end Mac Mini comes in at £529 here in Blighty and comes in as a 1.83Ghz Core Duo with 512mb memory and an 80Gb hard disk. If we were to upgrade this to a more usable 160Gb hard disk we come in at £669. Now if you take the bottom of the range iMac (17", 1.83Ghz Core 2 Duo) that comes as standard with the 160Gb drive for £679. The rest of the specifications are a little...

After I threw in some more memory our Team Server seems to be a lot faster. We now have it working over two sites, but we're using VPN at the second site to connect to the server here due to the small size of the team (TFS proxies don't come cheap you know...). So far it's all going smoothly and our daily server side builds with unit tests are keeping us from breaking the build for too long with any bad checkins. Next up comes testing. I've just about finished a big modification to one area of the application and...

Part 1 here. So now I have XNA in my hands and I've had a chance to play. Is there anything revolutionary here? No, I don't think there is. Is it a good product? Yes, it's a great product for making games and when the 360 is supported then it'll be something really special. As far as I can see you wouldn't want (or be able to) use it inside of normal applications to provide 3D or the like but if you want to make a game then it's a great starting point. I'll have to code some more in order...

I'm writing this using Live Writer running under Parallels on my intel Macbook Pro. Parallels is a great product and I now do a large chunk of my day to day work under it so when Codeweavers announced a beta of CrossOver Mac I jumped at the chance to see what I could run under it. Of course I had low expectations for .NET running as it's just far too complicated for what is basically a copy of Wine and it's nowhere near there yet. I tried anyway and of course it failed. In fact every application that I've tried has failed so far except IE 6,...