Customer Impressions

I love my job. Today has been uber busy. Updating the XNA presentation, giving a couple of lectures, attending a mid-semester review meeting with the second year (we had loads of students turn up - and some really good discussion about how we do what we do).

And acting as a customer in our Software Engineering project. At first I was not looking forward to this. We usually try to get people to do this who the students doing the work are not familiar with. I've been giving lectures to this group for a while, and in this respect I'm quite well known.

But for the project I have to be "just a customer". But actually it is quite fun. Some of the people who have come to see me have asked jaw droppingly sensible questions that I would not have thought of asking if I was doing the job, which is great. And I quite like being unhelpful and uncommunicative for a change. At least, I think it is a change......

I hate Microsoft

I had all the slides ready for my talk at TechEd 2006 in Barcelona. I'd even scheduled a presentation today so that I could preview the material to the students on our MSc course. Everything was ready. What could go wrong?

Well, what went wrong was that the Microsoft XNA team were too darned efficient for me, and released the second beta of the XNA Express yesterday. What's worse, they've fixed a bunch of issues that were irritating me and also made the Content Manager bit work so well that I just can't ignore it in the talk. I hate them all.

Because I have no intention of standing up next week and saying a whole bunch of stuff which is out of date or plain wrong it has meant that I've had to spend a big chunk of last night and this morning updating the slides and the sample code.

The good news is that the talk seemed to go OK (although I'm going to tighten it up just a bit) and that the sample game, "Hot Salad Death with Cheese" went down quite well.

Next stop Spain.

A Field Guide to Developers

Joel Spolsky writes wonderful articles. Here is another one about how to hire and manage developers. Well worth a read.

Only Human

I've been fretting about all the typos that students keep finding in my Orange C# Book (remember, you can get your own personal copy here folks). At the same time I've been reading the Charles Petzold book "Applications = Code+Markup". And this has cheered me up a bit.

Windows Presentation Framework Section

I've been playing with "The new way we are all going to be writing Windows Programs"(tm). You can find my first sample program in the WPF section on this very site...