Saturday, May 9, 2009 at 11:06PM Last year I wrote a little programming introduction course packed full of XNA insights and dodgy clipart. Microsoft have now published it in their Faculty Resource Center, and you can get a copy here. If you are thinking about teaching programming using XNA it might be worth a look, if only for the jokes (there are two) and my quirky English spelling.
Friday, May 8, 2009 at 01:02PM This is a quick test of the Twitter Notify plugin for Windows Live Writer.
Rob
Ha. Didn't work. Seems I'm going to have to fiddle with the settings a bit.
Software Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 07:34AM Today and tomorrow I am going to be mostly in the practical labs marking first year programming work. The students can produce either an implementation of a Bank Account management program or an XNA version of the Pong game and they have to show it off and chat about how it works. The marking is is very time consuming, but I love doing it because it lets me chat to the students and see what they can really do.
To make things even more interesting I’ve produced some stickers which anyone who gets more than 90% will get either a “Best Banker” or “Strongest Pong” sticker.
Well, could you get one?
Life Wednesday, May 6, 2009 at 07:40PM I’ve been running Windows 7 Beta on my tiny netbook for a while. This week, having downloaded the Release Candidate I thought I’d step up to that. I had to do a complete re-install, which was a bit of a pain, but the effort is well worth it. Everything seems a lot more polished and there is some lovely artwork in the desktop and background themes that you get with the distribution.
From a technical point of view it doesn’t seem to have lost any of the responsiveness of the earlier releases and it found and used all the hardware in my device. If you are using Vista, or even XP, you should take a serious look at this, it really is very nice.
Software Tuesday, May 5, 2009 at 07:16PM I’m presently working away on the chapters for the sequel to my XNA 2.0 book. It is going to be about XNA 3.0 (which sounds like progress to me).
I used to get a bit upset when I got one of my chapters back covered in alterations and questions. Nowadays I’m a lot more relaxed though, as I realise that the editors are just making it better.
Life 