By day I've been a Winforms programmer for the last few years, but over the last few weeks I've found myself branching out. The first was to do a project with WPF, and there's going to be a slight problem going back to winforms now because WPF is so much better. Time to rewrite the main app I think (kidding!). The second thing I've been doing is coding a website using ASP.NET. It's not something I've done much of before, and it's meant a lot of database work as well which is something I haven't really done for years...

The Good: Currently I'm playing lots of Heavenly Sword. It looks great (except the shadows, but shadows look awful on all consoles) and it's a lot of fun to play. I can feel the story running out though. The most amazing thing? It's got good acting and mocap in it! And some bad acting too, but I'll gloss over that. The Bad: It's made the triangle button on my controller break! I've not exactly used that controller much you know... The Better: Sometimes things happen for a reason? http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15564 The biggest problem with it according to some sites? It's heavier....

I've been playing far too much warhawk recently than's healthy and it's great fun. I thought I'd get the pro PS3 bit out before I lay into another aspect... The PS3 store. Is it just me or is the store really awful? It may be that I'm in a backwater of the world (the UK) and so we don't deserve content, but it's not the content that bugs me really. It's the UI. You see the problem I have with it is that the UI is so obviously designed for a mouse because it's just a web browser...

I've run into a problem with WPF and icons. I got some made up by our graphic designer and he took the opportunity to do some proper Vista icons with high resolutions. I added the icon to my application and got an error. It turns out that although you can set the application icon to a file that has a compressed PNG version embedded, a WPF form cannot support there being compression in the icon. Most annoying. I got a version generated that just had an uncompressed PNG instead and that seems to work fine so it looks like...

Adding a keyboard to a console is easy, even the Wii is getting (so far limited) USB keyboard support and so you just plug a keyboard in and go for it. On the PS3 you can use bluetooth keyboards too I believe, which helps with that whole sitting on a sofa and not wanting cables problem. Microsoft have now come out with the Xbox 360 Messenger Kit (another brilliant name there!). Can adding a keyboard to your controller actually work? First off it's a really nice piece of design. It uses the 2 screw holes at the end of...

Well, I think it's a classic anyway. Via Extralife comes this: It's amazing what a bit of re-editing and some different music will do to a film.

I've been playing a bit of Warhawk on the PS3 lately. Now I could be cruel and say it's nice to actually play a game on the PS3, but something is bothering me about the game and I can't help but feel that they've missed a massive trick. In fact two companies would do what it's trying to do better. First up is Microsoft. Warhawk is Peer to Peer. Microsoft would run it through live. This may sound like a small thing, but I can only host a 4 player game on my system because of bandwidth. I can't...

I really wish that every time I see the word Katmai I didn't read it as Katamari. It's making following tech news quite confusing.