Here's a list of features I'd love to see added to expression blend: Maintain solution folders in the project view. Large solutions become a problem when you have loads of projects, especially when it means your unit test assemblies start to get mixed up with the application. Support the same path length as Visual Studio. I had a project fail to load in Blend that loads fine in VS.NET 2005 Don't make projects start as all expanded, or add a collapse all option. Make Expression Light the default theme, it looks a lot better than dark. I can't seem to...

This is my new favourite thing in the world. Yesterday my favourite thing was Powershell, but I'm very fickle. http://www.joystiq.com/2007/06/19/ace-combat-6-flight-stick-bundle/ This had really better work with XNA!

I sometimes wonder if what I want to write here will be of interest to anybody. Blogging about my daily work would be dull and my XNA stuff at the moment seems to be turning into researching medieval architectural design that involves having zero lines of code written. That leaves gaming so you'd all better get interested in what I'm playing on my Xbox.  Saying that I'll start off with some thoughts about a 360 game design decision: Achievements. As anybody who knows me will tell you, I'm an Xbox 360 achievement whore. At the time of writing this post I only have a...

Lots of apple announcements happened yesterday. We're getting Safari for Windows (1st install failed with an error and the 2nd on my work PC failed to get through to external websites because it's not as clever as every other browser ever made. There isn't going to be a 3rd attempt for a while), which is strange and quite possibly a very bad move because it'll just cause more people to target it while looking for vulnerabilities and quite soon it'll be like Firefox and start loosing it's secure reputation. Now I use Safari all the time because it's so much better than...

 One of the dirty little secrets of the side of the industry that I'm in is that I have to work with big companies who love these requirements things. You know the sort of thing, massive documents with lots of mentions of the word shall everywhere. In fact I've got one open at the moment that the customer wants traceability for, including a lovely thing called a traceability matrix. Now I'm using Team Foundation Server and that's great for traceability because I can do things like see what task a line of code was changed for and auditors love that kind of...

If Sony really want to make the PS3 better then I'd suggest they fix the bug that crashes out all of the controllers. Yep, even the DVD style remote control. It seems that every time I use the damn console I have to reset it using the old pull out the power cord trick after the latest patch, which isn't good as whenever a friend asks if they should buy one I have to say no. There are no games and it just plain doesn't work right... I only use it as a DVD (SD and Blu-ray) player nowadays, they...

Seriously I do. Is there some facility that I can check myself into that will cure me of my console buying obsession? Maybe I need to up my "It must have two games I want" rule to 10 or something. I'm even considering a PSP now, that's how bad it's got. While I'm here, have some advice for the street racing mode in Crackdown. Most of the time you have enough time to go back to the agency garage, grab the supercar (aka the Batmobile, only with more guns) and be waiting back on the track before the other...