Kid Programming with Kodu Coming to Xbox 360

As I’ve written before, I originally got the programming bug from a desire to build my own text adventure games. with significant influence from my dad. Now that I’m a father myself, I want my kids to have a similar opportunity, even if they never choose to go into the “family business”.

Of course, the technology has moved on significantly since the days of “You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike”. At CES yesterday, Microsoft announced Kodu which I’ve written about before under it’s original name Boku. Kodu came out of Microsoft Research as a tool for teaching kids how to program. The programming language is very visual and iconic and you use the Xbox controller exclusively for all input. Here’s a screenshot:

To demo Kodu at CES, Robbie Bach brought a 12 year old girl named Sparrow up on stage to demo. I showed the video to my kids this morning and they went gaga for it. They’re a little young - Patrick turns 6 next month and Riley turns 4 later this year – but I think they’ll be able to get the hang of it (with a little help from dad). Below is the video of the CES demo, and there are more Kodu videos at On10 (Matthew MacLaurin on Kodu and Watch Kodu in Action).

Personally, I think this is brilliant. I have been eagerly waiting a change to play this with my kids for over a year, so I’m very excited that they’re bringing this to market. Seriously, Halo Wars just got bumped to the #2 slot on my “Most Anticipated Xbox Games of 2009” list.

I’m most interested in how these creations will be shared online. I couldn’t find any details, but Robbie specifically said “And on Xbox Live they can distribute and share those finished games with other people.” Will there be a charge? (“normal” Community Games cost between $2.50 and $10 a pop) How will parental controls affect shared Kodu games? I guess those details will come closer to release.

Morning Coffee 168 - E3 Edition

Yesterday, was Microsoft's big reveal for Xbox 360 this coming holiday season. If you're not a gamer, please move along, nothing to see here. Also note, I work @ Microsoft, but not in the games division so this is only my thoughts on yesterday's announcements.

• While several "hard-core" games were showcased - Fallout 3, Resident Evil 5, Fable 2, Gears of War 2 and the surprise announcement that Final Fantasy XIII - the rest of yesterday's briefing screamed "we're not just for hard core gamers!"  Call it the Wii effect. Even the title of the main E3 Press Release was Gameplay for Every Passion.
• Honestly, my favorite announcement from yesterday wasn't game related at all - it was the announcement of Netflix on Xbox 360. I've been hoping for a flat rate subscription plan since Video Marketplace first launched. Soon, I'll have it.
• I'm not sure what I think of the New Xbox Experience yet. On the one hand, the whole cartoon avatar thing isn't really my bag. Plus, isn't it quite the Mii clone? However, the ability to share photo and video viewing experiences - even with cartoony avatars - and the flashy + engaging navigation mechanism looks like a real improvement. Here's hoping they improve the performance of navigating hard drive content (games library, gamer pictures, etc).
• Congrats to my friend Matt who's been very involved in the development of the new Primetime game show channel. I'm not that interested in "1 vs 100", but I think the potential of that game model is pretty huge. If they created a Jeopardy game for Primetime, I think my parents would by a 360 right away.
• Music / party games seem to have been the primary focus of the press briefing. I'm definitely getting Rock Band 2 (AC/DC woot!) and I think my wife would like Lips (she usually sings when we play Rock Band). I want to see how the "wireless interactive microphones: Featuring stylish interactive motion sensors and lights" will work. Guitar Hero World Tour looks cool too, but I'm not re-buying all new music hardware.
• You're in the Movies looks like a hoot, plus it doesn't really look like a game, so much as a "party activity". For example, while there are minigame winners or losers, "winning" takes a back seat to the final movie result. I'm guessing this will be big with the kids.
• Speaking of kids, Patrick is really looking forward to Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts. He loves anything related to building, and building fantastic vehicles is a core part of the gameplay. As for Riley, I think she's getting old enough to enjoy Viva Pinata - she enjoys watching Patrick and I play - though I'm not sure we need the new Viva Pinata.
• Geometry Wars 2 and Portal: Still Alive, both coming to Xbox Live Arcade. 'nuff said.
• Not really "new" news, but XNA Community Games launches this fall. I've got a creators club membership, so I'm able to experiment with this now - it rocks, though the available games are pretty shall I say "unpolished" at this point.
• Halo Wars not coming until 2009. :(
• No new Bungie news, but their website is counting down to *something* tomorrow. I guess we'll find out then.

Morning Coffee 167

• If you're a gamer, you're probably already well aware that E3 is this week. The Too Human demo has already been released. I have a friend who's been working on "something" that will be announced today (I think).
• Live Mesh folks pushed out an update Friday. Among the new features is the ability to sync folders among peers but NOT up to the cloud. This is cool because it means I can sync my many many GB of pictures and music on my home machine backed up with Carbonite. This means I can sync them without blowing thru my 5GB Mesh storage limit.
• It looks like there's a new F# drop - 1.9.4.19 - but as usual there is no announcement or details as to what's new. Release notes guys, look into it.  UPDATE - Don Syme blogged the release, and it's pretty minor. a .NET FX 3.5 SP1 bug fix, a fix for Mono, and they removed WebRequest.GetResponseAsync to make F# work on Silverlight. And the release notes are in the readme. My bad.
• Speaking of F#, it was "partially inspired" by OCaml, so when I see papers related to OCaml, I immediately wonder if I an apply the described techniques to F#. "Catch me if you can, Towards type-safe, hierarchical, lightweight, polymorphic and efficient error management in OCaml" is one such paper. (via LtU)
• Speaking of functional programming, Matthew Podwysocki posted a bunch of FP links as well as a Code Gallery Sample on FP in C#. Good stuff.
• As per Scott Guthrie, it looks like there's a new ASP.NET MVC drop coming this week.
• Based on posts by Ted Neward, Dare Obasanjo and Steve Vinoski, Google Protocol Buffers sounds like it's going to be a dud. Note, I haven't looked at it depth personally, I'm just passing on opinions of some folks I read and trust.
• Speaking of Dare, both he and James Hamilton take a look at Cassandra and come away impressed. I wonder how easy it is to code against from Python and/or .NET?
• Bart de Smet has a cool sample of calling out to PowerShell from IronRuby via the backtick command. Pretty cool, but it would even cooler to show how to call out to PS and return .NET objects to Ruby (though that would probably not be spec compliant for the backtick command).
• Here's a MS code name I had never heard before - Zermatt. It's "a framework for implementing claims-based identity in your applications." (via Steve Gilham)

Morning Coffee 157

• My Xbox 360 started flashing the dreaded Red Ring of Death on Friday. <sigh> I'm not going to have much time to play in the next week, so it's not the end of the universe, but I did have to dig an old DVD player out of the garage for interim duty.
• My Caps really stepped in it over the weekend dropping two games they had to have and by most reports (aka according to my dad) that they dominated most of the way. Caps Playoff Math isn't as dire as say Clinton's Nomination Math, but they are three games back of the Hurricanes with twelve to play.
• Ted Neward has a pretty good F# overview article in the most recent MSDN Magazine. I say pretty good because I wonder if someone with no functional programming experience will "get it". As much as I like F# and functional programming, I think some of the basic concepts don't pass Don Box's two beer test.
• Speaking of Ted, somehow his feed fell off my radar (bad DevHawk!) and I missed several great posts like Modular Toolchains (note to Ted, check out A Research C# Compiler), Why we need both static and dynamic in the same language (note to self, check out Cobra) and The Fallacies Remain.... (recently, I'm the guy shouting about risks).
• Speaking of MSDN Magazine, have you seen their new site redesign? I can't find any announcement of it, but man the site looks great.
• If you missed MIX, the sessions are all online already. That was fast.
• John Lam blogs about the availability of the Dynamic Silverlight bits. Apparently, Dynamic Silverlight includes more recent bits than the Silverlight 2 SDK, which does includes binaries and tools for IronPython, IronRuby and Managed JScript (quickstart). So you can get started with dynamic languages on Silverlight using the SL SDK alone, but I expect that the Dynamic Silverlight bits will be updated more regularly than the SDK.

Morning Coffee 149

• Big news yesterday was Microsoft announcing "Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability". More details available at the new Interoperability website and this interview with Bob Muglia.
• The videos from Lang.NET 2008 are now available, including mine.
• Mix08 is just under two weeks away, and the news is ramping up. Scott Guthrie provides a "first look" at the Silverlight 2.0 beta (aka the one with .NET) that will release @ Mix. He also provides a set of eight tutorials where he demonstrates building a Digg client for Silverlight 2.0. I've been doing a little Silverlight 1.0 experimentation recently, but I think I'm going to scrap it in favor of waiting for 2.0.
• Shorter Nick Malik: IoC is cool, but isn't a silver bullet. Go read the whole thing.
• Brad Wilson has a new laptop with a solid-state hard drive. VS08 installs in under 10 minutes? I gotta get me one of those...
• In addition to the XNA news, Microsoft also announced Gears of War 2, Fable 2 and Ninja Gaiden II and Too Human will all be available this year exclusively on Xbox 360. Of those, I'm most interested in Fable 2, though Too Human is looking interesting. But what about Halo Wars? When is that shipping?

Delivering the XNA Vision

Shortly after posting today's morning coffee, I notice two "blogging advisories" in my inbox from the XNA team. They're announcing two things: XNA Game Studio 3.0 and Xbox LIVE Community Games.

Given that there was an XNA Game Studio 1.0 and 2.0, news that there will be a 3.0 version releasing this holiday season isn't what veteran bloggers like myself call "a surprise". However, the news that XNA GS 3.0 is going to support development of Zune based games was quite a surprise. Rumors of a Microsoft hand held gaming device crop up every few months, but there's never been any substance to them. The Zune isn't really a handheld gaming device like the DS or PSP - the FAQ points out that it will take "creative thinking" to build a game for a device with a 240x320 display that's designed for one hand use. Furthermore, Cesar "Zune Insider" Menendez points out that "Zune is a wireless music and video player first and foremost".

Still, it's pretty cool to think about what a Zune based game experience would be like. So far we know it'll be 2D only and it have full access to any non-DRM music on the device. Also, it will be social - Zune XNA games will support wireless multiplayer with up to 8 players, though it doesn't support cross-platform networking with Xbox and Windows. I can't wait to see what the community does with this capability. I'll definitely be getting a Zune now.

As for the Xbox LIVE Community Games, it's something the XNA folks have been hinting at since last year. This is the announcement the XNA folks have been building towards since day one when they called XNA the "YouTube for videogames". Very much unlike the retail or arcade Xbox channels, Community Games will be peer-reviewed by XNA Creators Club community members instead of Microsoft (though unsurprisingly, MS "reserves the right to reactively take down a game without prior notification"). You'll even be able to sell your games, though details on that won't be available until later in the year.

Like XNA GS 3.0, Community Games will be available "during the holiday 2008 season." However, for the next month, Microsoft is offering a preview of Community Games, offering seven community developed games for free, including last year's DreamBuildPlay co-winner "The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai". I can't wait to get home and try them out.

IMO, this is a huge announcement. But what's most impressive to me is how much they've accomplished in a fairly short time. XNA was only announced two and a half years ago. That's amazing progress for a pretty small team. I can't wait to see what they do next.

Morning Coffee 147

• My son Patrick turns five today. The big treat was his cousin Jack coming up for a visit. Here's a picture of the two of them at Patrick's party on Saturday. My wife has all the details on her blog. Update: My wife just posted a whole slew of Early Patrick Pictures.
• If my son is five, it means this blog is also five - I started this blog about a month before Patrick was born. I never remember to mark the occasion until Paddy boy's big day comes around.
• Major props to the House of Representatives for growing a backbone and not caving to President 30% Approval on telecom immunity...yet. Personally, I'd like to see the House bury the measure completely, though I'm not holding my breath. But given that even the right-wing Washington Times reports "Analysts say FISA will suffice", maybe the House Dems will do the right thing.
• After tearing it up since Thanksgiving, the Caps have gone a little cold. 5-4-1 in their last ten and 2-2-1 in their last five. In the month of February, they're 1-3-1 against SE division opponents. Good news is that they're still even with Carolina (two points behind with two games in hand), half a game up on Atlanta, a game and a half up on Florida and two and a half games up on Tampa Bay.
• Bill Gates announced a new program called DreamSpark to provide college students access to all of Microsoft's developer and designer tools, including Visual Studio, Expression, SQL Server, Windows Server and XNA Creators Club membership. This looks like an outgrowth of the MSDN Academic Alliance program. I think it's a great idea. Update: Looks like high-school students will be able to access the DreamSpark program too. However, since they're minors, they have to get the software via their teachers. (via LiveSide)
• The winners of the XNA Silicon Minds contest have been announced. Of the five winners, Specimen looks the coolest to me. I wish I had more time to get into game development. (Via LetsKillDave)
• Speaking of game development, this week is the Game Development Conference, so be on the lookout for lots of game-related news. Xbox Live VP John Schappert is giving a keynote on "Unleashing the Creative Community". XNA GM Chris Satchell said last year they would "announce full details on, and ... vision for, opening XNA creations to the community" sometime this year. I'm guessing this is said announcement.
• Speaking of Xbox, there's a rumor that Microsoft and Netflix will announce this week that Netflix is bringing their Watch Instantly service to Xbox 360. If true, sign me up!
• Grigori Melnik announces the GAX/GAT February 2008 final release. Key feature is VS08 support. Is it just me, or does calling it the "final release" make it sound like they won't be upgrading GAX/GAT further?
• Speaking of p&p, Grigori also announces the Feb 2008 CTP of Unity, p&p's new IoC container. I've seem lots of folks echoing the announcement, but not much in the way of specifics on Unity itself. For example, Chris Brandsma describes IoC and mentions Unity, but he doesn't cover any Unity specifics. :(
• MSIT EA Nilesh Bhide has started blogging. His first post is on Customer perception of Service Quality in S+S/SaaS. I've worked closely with Nilesh in the past two years, so I'm excited to see him take to the blogosphere. (via Nick Malik)
• I don't know how I missed it, but the MSDN Code Gallery launched last month. As Charlie Calvert explained, this is logical successor to GotDotNet's user samples area. Between Code Gallery and CodePlex, GotDotNet has finally been shuttered for good.
• Telligent, makers of the very popular Community Server, have released Graffiti CMS, which looks like a more flexible content platform than Community Server. (via DNK)
• In somewhat unexpected news (at least, unexpected by me) Microsoft has released specs for the Office binary file formats. I'm not sure why this is happening now, rather than say when we released the specs for the Open Office XML file formats. (via DNK)

Morning Coffee 144

• I finished Mass Effect last night. I definitely need to play thru that one again, though I'll probably wait until the new Bring Down the Sky DLC ships next month.
• Caps won again last night, improving to 20-10-4 since changing coaches at Thanksgiving. They're now at 57 points, taking the lead in the SE division with a full game on Carolina, Atlanta and Florida. Still a ways to go - 27 games left in the regular season - and things are far from "sewn up" but we're a damn sight better off than we were in November.
• Speaking of a horserace, looks like Clinton and Obama are in one after Super Tuesday. Their estimated delegate counts are basically tied. On the other side of the aisle, McCain opened up what is probably insurmountable lead - even though he has the right-wing media stars and Christian leaders against him. Money quote of the day:

“The real story of the night, when you look at their rallies and their turn-out numbers, is that the Dems have two strong candidates either of whom could lead a united party to victory. Forget the gaseous platitudes: in Dem terms, their choice on Super Duper Tuesday was deciding which candidate was Super Duper and which was merely Super. Over on the GOP side, it was a choice between Weak & Divisive or Weaker & Unacceptable. Doesn’t bode well for November.”
- Mark Steyn, National Review 
(via Carpetbagger Report, lest you think I regularly read National Review)

• Charlie Calvert is starting a new series on the future of C#. First up: Dynamic Lookup. Probably most interesting is the news that the DLR "will be the infrastructure on which the C# team implements dynamic lookup". Does this mean C# will target the DLR? Sure sounds like it. I think it's a good addition, but I'm not a fan of the proposed syntax. (via Bitter Coder)
• Brian McNamara saw me present @ LangNET and sent me a link to his blog. He's building up a monadic parser combinator library in C# 3.0. This is basically the same concept that FParsec implements, though C#'s syntax is much less attractive than F#'s for this kind of code. However, Brian does a very good job explaining why monadic parser combinators are useful and making the idea accessible to the C# programmer (i.e. you don't have to learn F# or Haskell to understand what he's talking about). He also points to Luke Hoban's C# 3.0 monadic parser implementation.

Morning Coffee 143

• I've been sick for three days, hence the lack of posting around here.
• As a Redskins fan, it's hard to root for any other NFC East team. On the other hand, it sure was easy to root against the Patriots. Congrats to the Giants on their Super Bowl victory. Favorite headline: 18 and uh-oh!
• Sounds like there's cause for optimism regarding the writer's strike. But is it already too late? Will the 9% drop in viewers ever come back? Personally, I think the studios have hastened their own irrelevance.
• With last night's win, the Caps are one game above .500. In and of itself, that's nothing to be proud of - Coach Boudreau remarked when we reached .500 that the Caps had "officially reached mediocrity". However, the Caps are the only team in the SE conference that's above .500. If hockey used baseball standings, Carolina, Atlanta and Florida would each be 1/2 game back of the Caps. It's going to be a fight to the finish.
• In fairly big managed Ruby news, Wayne Kelly has decided to contribute to the IronRuby effort, effectively walking away from the Ruby.NET which helped get off the ground. One the one hand, obviously this is great for IronRuby. On the other hand, I liked the idea of multiple managed implementations of Ruby, so here's hoping Ruby.NET doesn't fade away.
• Speaking of the DLR, I know I mentioned Martin Maly's blog in my Lang.NET Morning Coffee Post, but I didn't actually get to read his posts on targeting the DLR until I unexpectedly had several days off sick. If you are at all interested in writing your own language for the .NET platform: Go. Read. Now. You should also check out Tomas Restrepo's blog, he has also started writing about targeting the DLR.
• Larry O'Brien's blog is currently offline, but he commented that he doubted my ToyScript F# parser would be more than 600 lines of code. Currently, the parser is clocking in at 287 lines of code plus about 50 more for the AST. It's not done yet - see earlier statement about being sick - but I'm fixing bugs not writing additional code at this point. To be completely accurate, that's 287 lines of FParsec code. It's taken me a little bit to learn FParsec, but so far I'm pretty happy with it.
• Scott Hanselman points to the new MS Deploy project, a tool for managing content and configuration on web servers. I've never understood why this wasn't a standard part of IIS. It seems every hosting company I've used has rolled their own web-based management tool like DotNetPanel.
• Oh yeah, Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 shipped Monday. Congrats!
• I fired up Inside Xbox the other day, and there was a page about the new Disney Channel show "Phineas and Ferb". Of course, with two kids under five, anything new on the Disney Channel is notable in my house. What made this blog-worthy is the fact that it's directed and written by Dan Povenmire, who I knew from my USC days. I used to go see his band Keep Left and groan loudly at the bad puns in their song "PSA". Dan, if you found this searching for yourself online: Awesome work, my kids love the show!

Morning Coffee 139

• Big news on the WGA strike front: the AMPTP reached a deal with the Directors Guild last weeks. Initial reaction from United Hollywood is mixed, but I'm hopeful this will at least get the AMPTP / WGA talks started again.
• Speaking of new media, Xbox 360 Fanboy has a rundown of 45 short films from Sundance that are getting released on Xbox Live Marketplace. That's pretty a-typical content for XBLM. Typically, new content on XBLM has been from "Hollywood Heavyweights". I'm pretty excited to see them branch out content wise.
• Speaking of Xbox 360, seems they had a good year. Congrats!
• Still speaking of Xbox 360, everyone gets a free copy of Undertow this week.
• Scott Guthrie announces the availability of the .NET Framework Source Code. Shawn Burke has instructions for how to use it with VS08. So far, they've made the core base class libraries, ASP.NET, Windows Forms, WPF, ADO.NET and XML available. LINQ, WCF and WF are expected to become available "in the weeks and months ahead".
• Ted Neward wonders if Java is "Done" like the Patriots, or "Done" like the Dolphins? If you want my opinion (I'm guessing yes, since you're reading my blog), definitely done like the Dolphins. OpenJDK was a desperation move to make Java "cool" again, but it won't work. People who want an open source stack are using LAMP and language wonks who saw Java as mainstream SmallTalk have moved on to Ruby. The question will be if Sun buying MySQL will make Sun cool or MySQL uncool by association. I'm guessing the latter.
• Speaking of Ted, he's got a great post about the relevance of game programming to the mainstream or enterprise developer.
• Speaking of game development, David Weller points to all the new XNA GS 2.0 content up on Creators Club Online.
• There's a new version (1.9.3.14) of F# out, but no announcement from Don regarding what's new. I reviewed the release notes, seems like this is primarily a bug-fix release with only very minor feature additions.
• Speaking of F#, Don points to Greg Neverov's implementation of Software Transactional Memory in F#. This immediately reminded me of Tim Sweeney's Next Mainstream Programming Language talk. Tim suggested said language would need to support a combination of side-effect free functional code and software transactional memory. F# is looking to be closer to that language all the time.
• Still speaking of F#, Don Syme's Expert F# book is out. I read the draft version - it rocks - but I'm still going to get my own real copy. You should too.
• With their win Saturday, the Caps are back to .500 for the first time since late October. Since Thanksgiving, the Caps are 15-7-4. Only four teams in the league have a better record over that time span. We play one of them tonight - the Penguins - and it's on Versus, so I'll even get to see it. In HD no less.

Morning Coffee 135

• Congrats to Barack Obama for walking away with the Iowa Democratic Caucus, which set turnout records. Frankly, I'm pretty cool with any of the democratic front runners but I think Obama has the best chance of winning in November. I'm not sure Edwards second time around will be any more successful than the last and I believe Clinton would drive the GOP GOTV campaign better than any of the actual GOP candidates would.
• Obviously, I like to play M-rated games like Bioshock and Mass Effect. But I also like games I can play with my kids like Lego Star Wars. There are two new Lego games coming out this year: Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Batman. I can't wait.
• Speaking of gaming, Xbox LIVE had some issues over the holiday break, due to record setting sign-ups and concurrent users. Record setting numbers is a nice problem to have if you're on the business side, but a not-so-nice if you're a customer or work in operations. The XBL GM announced they're offering a "token of appreciation" for everyone's patience - a free XBLA game. Assuming it's not a crappy game, it's a classy move.
• I watched Transformers on HD-DVD last night. Fun movie with lots of action, but man is it dumb. John Turturro is the only real stand-out.
• Dustin Campbell implements cons, cdr and car from Scheme in C# and VB. While of limited production value (Dustin specifically warns readers not to use any of his code), it really demonstrates how different the functional world is from the object/imperative one, right down to the concept of type. Cons doesn't return a tuple, it returns function with two bound variables. (via DNK)

Morning Coffee 133

• I've been off for two weeks, so getting back into "the swing" of things will probably take a day or two - both at work and on my blog. Hope everyone had a happy holiday season.
• I ended the year with 245 blog posts, which wasn't quite as many as either of my first two years blogging, but was much more than I had been writing for the last two years.
• It was a Zune Xmas in the Pierson house. I got a pink Zune for my wife, and my mother and father got Zunes for each other. I got to load them all up with content for Xmas morning. Maybe I'm just used to WMP, but I'm not a huge fan of the Zune software. Yes, it's very pretty but it's missing some fairly basic features like automatic down-sampling lossless music. On the other hand, the on-device experience rocks and my wife is using her Zune regularly. I've got a trip to England coming up in April, and I'm thinking about getting one of the new 80GB ones for the trip.
• They lost any chance of playing for the national championship, but USC sure looked like a champion yesterday. Seems appropriate for this crazy college football season that if Ohio State doesn't win big, pretty much all the other BCS bowl winners with a legitimate argument to be #1.
• The Caps beat the eastern-conference leading Senators yesterday for the third time this season and the second time in four days. They have 13 points in the last ten games and 10-5-4 since Boudreau took over as coach. If they keep that pace up, they would likely make the playoffs - that would be quite a feat given their horrific start.
• Speaking of hockey, I watched most of the Winter Classic yesterday, including the game-winning shootout goal by the Anointed One. It was really strange but cool to watch a hockey game between snowflakes. I agree with Scott Burnside's take that these outdoor games are good for the league, but shouldn't be a regular part of the season.
• I finished Portal yesterday - that's a fantastic game. I also got Mass Effect, so now I need to decide which to take on first: that or Half-Life 2.
• A few months ago, I was thinking about using HomePlug for home networking but decided to upgrade my wireless network instead. But recently I've started streaming movies from my loft computer to my Xbox, and the wireless network isn't always up to the task. I could run CAT5, but there's already an unused coax cable running up to the loft and I wondered if I could just use that? I discovered the Multimedia over Coax Alliance, but none of their certified products appear to be available. Those products have to share the home coax network with the cable company, but I can dedicate my coax cable. Anyone know a way to use coax to bridge CAT5 networks? Even something DIY?

Morning Coffee 129

• Short coffee this morning, as I'm home with a tweaked ankle.
• I started playing Indigo Prophecy over the weekend. It's an original Xbox game, released as part of the new Xbox Originals program. It has a good metacritic score (84), though apparently it wasn't much of a retail success. I'm enjoying it, though it's not very challenging. It's more an interactive movie than a game. Good story, though.
• The ASP.NET MVC preview dropped today, Scott Guthrie has the details. Scott Hanselman has a 40 minute how-to video and Phil Haack has several articles up already.
• Speaking of ASP.NET MVC and Scott Guthrie, he's got another post in his series on ASP.NET MVC. This time, he's covering how to handle form input / POST data.
• Erik Meijer has posted some of his thoughts on Volta. He's one of the guys behind Volta, so it's worth a good look. (via Dare Obasanjo)
• Late Addition - the ASP.NET Extensions is more than just the MVC stuff. It also includes AJAX improvements, Silverlight support, ADO.NET Data Services and ASP.NET Dynamic Data Support. Data Services (formerly Astoria) let's you easily expose your database via RESTful services. I think Dynamic Data Support used to be code named Jasper. It's a "rich scaffolding framework" for ASP.NET. I assume that's to compete w/ Ruby on Rails.

Afternoon Coffee 126

• In a surprise to exactly nobody, the Caps let coach Glen Hanlon go yesterday. I gotta say I feel for the guy. I mean, he had to go, but still. The Caps promoted the coach of their minor league team Bruce Boudreau. Makes sense - the farm team is where you develop players, why not coaches to? The team responded by beating the Flyers in overtime, though they did blow a 3 goal lead along the way.
• It won't get them back in the national title hunt, but thrashing ASU may earn USC a ticket to a BCS bowl, or the Rose Bowl if the Ducks can't win without Dennis Dixon.
• I finally finished Dead Rising today. A sequel has been rumored and hinted at, but not confirmed even though the ending left the door wide open. I really enjoyed it, so here's hoping. I'm going to hold off on starting anything new until I get back from Canada, but it'll probably be R6:Vegas. Don't really have time between now and Christmas to finish Blue Dragon and it's 3 DVDs.
• In more "Screw Turkey Day, we're shipping anyway" news, p&p shipped a new version of the Web Service Software Factory. This one's called the "Modeling Edition". I saw some of this stuff back in August, and I like what those p&p folks are doing. It's worth a look, just to see how they've integrated DSL and GAT.
• My old team shipped a new version of their S+S demo app LitwareHR. There's also some tools for testing multi-tenant databases.
• Quick reminder: I'm @ DevTeach Vancouver next week, so blogging will be light. I've got a series of thoughts on F# ready to post, but we'll see when I get network access to post them. Given that I took a month off from blogging a short while back, I didn't bother asking Dale to cover for me.

Morning Coffee 125

• So I wasn't quite as close to the end of Dead Rising as I thought I was. Those who've played the game thru will understand.
• After their promising start, the Capitals lost yet again. At the 20 game point, they're now 6-13-1 for a league-worst 13 points. I think we're at the point where they need to fire Glen Hanlon. Nothing personal Glen, but it's not getting done. The only problem is who you would replace him with? Bob Hartley? Uh, no thanks. I think most Caps fans want Dale Hunter, but I think he's too involved with the London Knights - he's co-owner, president and head coach. But if we could get Dale, I'm guessing Glen would be gone in a heartbeat.
• The XNA team blog announced that XNA Game Studio 2.0's beta has released. The download is available from Creators Club Online. The big new feature in this release is network support, and they've shipped a new starter kit to get you started.
• In addition to shipping VS08 & .NET FX 3.5, a new CTP of SQL 2008 shipped yesterday. I couldn't find a good overview of what's new, but the SQL Express team has a post on what's new in just their corner of this release. (via Jesus Rodriguez)
• In more "I know it's Thanksgiving week, but we're shipping anyway" news, the Ruby.NET folks have shipped v0.9 - the first release since transferring control to the community. Does it run Rails? Not yet, but apparently they're "close to getting Ruby on Rails to run successfully". One thing that caught my eye is that it includes VS integration. Nice.

Morning Coffee 124

• While my blog was down last week, I finally finished Gears of War. I played thru on hardcore, but had to throttle back to casual to beat the last boss. I'd like to try and finish on hardcore, but I've moved on to Dead Rising - another game from last year I never had time to finish. I'm almost done the main play mode, though I understand there are other play modes that get unlocked when you finish it.
• I'm forbidden from buying any new games before Christmas, so Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed and The Orange Box will have to wait. My next game will either be Blue Dragon, which a friend let me borrow, or R6:Vegas, yet another (but the last) game from last year I never got time to play.
• I'll skip the "giving thanks" jokes and point out that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 have shipped.  Soma has the announcement and both Scott Guthrie and Sam Gentile summarize what's new. The Express editions are available from the new Express Developer Center. The VS SDK doesn't appear to be released yet, but I'm sure it will be along in due course.
• Speaking of VS SDK, CoDe Magazine did an entire issue on VS Extensibility which you can read online or download as PDF.
• Nick Malik took a bunch of heat back in June for what some thought was a redefinition of Mort, one of the Developer Division personas. Now Paul Vick thinks it's time to retire the Mort persona, primarily because of the negative connotation the name carries. His suggestion for a replacement is Ben (as in Franklin). And did you notice how similar Paul's description of Mort is to what Nick described? I'd say some folks owe Nick an apology.
• I said Friday I was going to take a closer look @ OpenID and OAuth. There's an intro to OpenID on their wiki and Sam Ruby's OpenID for non-SuperUsers seems to be the canonical source on implementing OpenID on your own blog. Frankly, reading the OpenID intro reminded me a lot of WS-Federation Passive Requestor Profile. Does OpenID have the equivalent of an "active" mode?
• Likewise, the Beginner’s Guide to OAuth series of posts by Eran Hammer-Lahav is a good intro to OAuth. The phrase "Jane notices she is now at a Faji page by looking at the browser URL" from the protocol walkthru makes me worry that OAuth is vulnerable to phishing. Having one of the OAuth authors call phishing victims careless and wishing for Karl Rove to "scare people into being more careful and smarter about what they do online" makes me think my fears are well grounded. I'm thinking maybe OAuth and OpenID aren't quite ready to nail down WS-*'s coffin.
• In researching OpenID, I came across this presentation hosted on SlideShare. I had never seen SlideShare before - it's kinda like YouTube for presentations. Sharing basic presentations is kinda lame - there doesn't appear to be any animation support, so the slides are basically pictures. However, they also support "slidecasting" where you sync slides to an audio file hosted elsewhere. That I like. I have a bunch of old decks + audio, maybe I'll stick them up there.

Morning Coffee 119

• The biggest news of the week IMHO is Soma announcing the formation of an F# product team. Specifically, they will "fully integrate the F# language into Visual Studio and continue innovating and evolving F#." Though Soma calls F# "another first-class programming language on the CLR", I get the feeling there won't be a "Visual F#" sku. Don Syme has more on the news.
• In other Soma announcement news, Popfly is now in beta. More details on what's new on the Popfly Team Blog. I haven't played with Popfly in depth, but I think it's got huge potential.
• Scott Guthrie details the upcoming ASP.NET MVC Framework. Personally, I'm not building web apps much these days, so I'm not really invested one way or the other. Given the interest in this approach, it's nice to see the ASP.NET team respond to the market, though I'm sure someone will complain that we're trying to kill off the various open-source MVC Web frameworks that have sprung up.
• Over in Windows Live, they shipped a new version of Live Search Maps, upgraded WL Photo Gallery (which I've been digging) to support Flickr and shipped an update to WL Accounts which allows you to link accounts.
• The Clarius folks keep churning out great tools for software factory developers. The latest is the T4 editor, which brings intellisense, color syntax highlighting and property inspector support for Text Templating Transformation Toolkit (aka T4) files. T4 files are used for code generation in both DSL Toolkit and GAT.
• David Pallman (again via Sam Gentile) suggests there are only three choices for infrastructure architecture: None/Point-to-point, Centralized/Hub-and-Spoke and Thin/Bus. I get the first two, but his explanation of the third goes to far into the "magic framework" category for my taste. "Physically distributed but logically centralized"? That doesn't make any sense to me at all.
• Fellowship of the Ring makes its way onto XBLM. Alas, not in HD so I'll stick w/ my extended four hour DVD version thankyouverymuch.

Morning Coffee 117

• Quick update to the DevHawk 2007 World Tour: I won't be making it to the SOA & BP Conference. Riley's having her tonsils out. As much as I'd like to hang with my geek peeps, family is the priority. But I can still make an evening event or geek dinner later in the week if anyone is game.
• Caps season-opening winning streak continues. Still 100% on the PK, though the power play is pretty anemic. As I said yesterday, it's WAAAAY to early in the season to start bragging, but starting strong is much better than starting weak.
• Speaking of hockey, looks like the NHL Network is launching in the US this month (it's been available in Canada since 2001). Also, NHL.tv is up and running. Those wishing to see Caps highlights can go directly to Capitals.NHL.tv. Unfortunately, if you want to see full games, you've got to subscribe to Center Ice or Center Ice Online to the tune of $150. But I don't want to get "up to 40 games each week", I just want the Caps games. Between the time zone difference and kids, it's not like I have time to watch that much hockey anyway. Why can't I subscribe to just the Caps games online for say $25 a season?
• Finished Halo 3 Sunday night. Fun game and a great end of the trilogy. Looking forward to what the newly-independent Bungie does next. Something tells me we haven't seen the last of Master Chief. However, I do think Bioshock has better and more original storytelling. Mass Effect looks like it'll be better still.
• Sam Gentile pointed out that his Neudesic colleague David Pallmann has posted a series of WCF tips. Several of them are right on the money like "Take Advantage of One Way Operations" and "Use a Discovery Mechanism to Locate Services". However, I can't agree with "Maintain a Service Catalog". David warns that if you don't, "The left hand won’t know what the right hand is doing." Of course, that's probably the case regardless of how you maintain your service catalog. And "Retry on minor failures"? That's fine, if you've got an idempotent operation. Unfortunately, most non-read operations aren't idempotent unless you take the time to design them that way. And most people don't.
• Speaking of Sam, he's blown up his CodeBetter blog and walked away from the ALT.NET crowd. I've not been a fan of this ALT.NET stuff since it surfaced - as Sam said, "ALT.NET is a divisive thing" - so I'm happy to see my good friend walk away from it.
• Speaking of ALT.NET, Scott Hanselman blogged about previewing the new ASP.NET MVC Framework at the ALT.NET conference. Like Sam, Scott thinks the term ALT.NET is "too polarizing". I like Scott's suggestion for Pragmatic.NET. Oh, and the MVC framework stuff looks cool too.
• Reading Dare's description of OAuth gave me a distinct sensation of deja-vu.

Morning Coffee 110

• Monday @ Gamefest, the XNA team announced XNA Game Studio 2.0. The two big new things are support for the entire VS product line (1.0 only works on VC# Express) and the addition of networking APIs. Let's Kill Dave has a good wrapup of the announcements from Gamefest Day One.
• Speaking of Xbox 360, I played thru the demos of Stranglehold and Bioshock. Two thumbs up on both. It's gonna be an expensive year for Xbox gamers.
• Mark Cuban noodles on taking your house public. "Why not create a market or exchange where homeowners can sell equity in their homes?" I've thought about this myself from time to time. However, Mark thinks making it happen would "probably take the country's biggest banks working together". I wonder if there's a more Web 2.0 social lending approach that would work better.
• Jeff Atwood calls virtualization as "the next great frontier for computer security". I agree 100%. But I don't think the action is going to be in "full-machine" virtualization like Virtual PC. Rather, it's going to be sandbox virtualization. Jeff mentions GreenBorder (now part of Google) but it's not the only solution. Some time ago, Microsoft acquired SoftGrid which uses sandbox virtualization for application deployment, but using SystemGuard for security sandboxing seems like a logical step.
• The WCF LOB Adapter SDK has released. Sonu Arora has the details. As part of the Integration team @ MSIT, I have a feeling we're going to become fairly familiar with this technology. (via Jesus Rodriguez).
• Speaking of Jesus, he thinks the six new SCA4SOA committees are "going to help". Why? Because inventing technology in committee has turned out so well in the past?
• John deVadoss cements BPM's fad du jour status by contrasting "big" BPM and "little" BPM. It's fairly obvious to me that big *anything* just doesn't work in the enterprise. But I worry that little *anything* doesn't work that well either. So how long until someone (probably Nick) starts arguing for "middle out" BPM?
• David Bressler wonders "What is it about registries that everyone thinks is a panacea for all things SOA?" Amen, Brother! Joe McKendrick claims it's required for governance, but then gets to what I think is the *real* reason for focus on registries: the "registry is a tangible offering" that vendors can sell. Just because it's productizable doesn't mean you need it.
• Hartmut Wilms responds to my retire the tenets post, but he seems to contradict himself. On the one hand, he suggests that "the four tenets just expressed, what “almost” everybody outside the MS world knew already". But then he goes on to dispute that the SO paradigm shift has even occurred! Hartmut, I'll grant you that WCF (among other similar stacks) are way too focused on "you write the classes, we'll handle the contracts and messages". On the other hand, if you don't provide a productive interface that most everyone can pick up and run with, the technology won't get adopted in the first place.

Morning Coffee 109

• I forgot to add a number to my last morning coffee post. However, after extensive research, I have determined that it was #108. So thing are continuing as usual today with #109. On the other hand, do you really want development and architecture opinions from a guy who can barely count? :)
• The finalists in the Dream-Build-Play contest have been announced. I haven't played any of them yet (some are available for download) but they several of them sure look good.
• And speaking of gaming, MS announced an Xbox 360 price drop yesterday. So if you want to get in on some of the XNA action, here's your chance (or you could just build for your PC - take your pick).
• Finally on the gaming front, if you're not busy Monday you can watch the first day of Gamefest 2007 online. Get the scoop on XNA 2.0 as well as the new XNA networking support. I, alas, am busy Monday so I'll have to catch it on demand.
• On to, you know, actual geek stuff things. Scott Guthrie seems to have retired his LINQ to SQL series and moved on to LINQ to XML. He shows how to build an RSS reader application with LINQ to XML. An oldie demo, but a goodie.
• Wanna learn F#, there's a whole site of samples up on CodePlex. (via Don Syme)
• Jeff Atwood is annoyed at how many different products you have to install to get a current & complete setup of VS 2005. Of course, MS shipped two parts of that stack since VS05 shipped (TFS & DBPro), three service packs (VS05 SP1, SQL 05 SP2 and DBPro SR1) and a major OS upgrade (VS Vista update). Doesn't the same thing happen with any shipping product after a few years? BTW, if this is such a huge hassle, I wonder why Jeff doesn't create a slipstreamed VS installer?
• Udi Dahan has a great post on estimation where he claims "Developers don’t know how to estimate." No argument, but the way he phrases it sounds like it's the developer's fault they suck at estimation. It's not. Developing - by definition - is building something you've never built before. Is it any surprise we suck at estimating how long it will take us to do something we've never done before?

Morning Coffee 103

• My Virtual TechEd Session What is Project Rome? got posted. It's only 8 minutes long, so as you might expect it's fairly high level. Thanks to Jon Flanders for handling interview duty.
• QUT's Garden Point Ruby.NET compiler is now the Ruby.NET open source project.
• The NHL is partnering with NeuLion to provide IPTV services for NHL team websites. They piloted with the Islanders last season. Wouldn't it be cool to get my favorite team's IPTV channel on my Xbox 360?
• Speaking of Hockey, I like this new NHL 08 trailer. It's about Reebok's new uniform system, so it focuses on the teams with new uniforms, including the Caps. It does feature marquee players from rival teams like Sidney Crosby and Eric Staal (who is the cover athlete) heavily. But any video featuring Ovechkin's stick handling, Semin scoring and Crosby falling to the ice is OK in my book.
• Speaking of Video Games, the XNA Dream-Build-Play contest is over. You can see and download some of the submitted games over on Ziggyware. Some of them look awesome. (via Michael Klucher)
• I said on Wednesday that it was a slow week. It may be, but I've also been less than motivated on pretty much all geek fronts this week. Not sure why.

Morning Coffee 100

• The big 100. This puts be 1083 posts behind Iron Link Poster Mike Gunderloy. As his .NET skills deteriorate, maybe I can catch up...but I doubt it. I'm only 77 posts behind Sam Gentile, so maybe that's a bit more feasible. 
• The ADO.NET Team blog announces the new Entity Framework CTP. Looks like there's also a new .NET Framework 3.5 CTP and new Visual Web Developer "Orcas" Express CTP as well. (via Sam Gentile)
• Speaking of "Orcas" VS 2008, it launches with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 next February. (via DNK)
• Scott Guthrie continues is LINQ to SQL series. This time, using LINQ to SQL to update the database.
• My friend Arvidra Semhi recently moved and rebooted his blog. Among his many accomplishments, Arvindra started the Architecture Journal. I'm particularly interested in his recent Service Capsule work. Subscribed.
• Last night was the Microsoft E3 Briefing. Gamerscore blog has the news rundown. Didn't seem to be any HUGE news. Last year's E3 was the first Halo 3 showing and X06 featured the Halo Wars announcement. Nothing that earth-shaking this time, though the XBLM keeps on rolling, now featuring Disney movies. (Major Nelson has a list.) I'm thinking that the whole HD-DVD vs. BluRay war is going to be eclipsed by direct download before it's over, though I'm still waiting for PC support & all-you-can-eat pricing.
• Politics 2.0 Watch: Clay Shirky has a great blog post on modern-day Luddites. As he points out: "A Luddite argument is one in which some broadly useful technology is opposed on the grounds that it will discomfort the people who benefit from the inefficiency the technology destroys." How much inefficiency is there in our modern political system? And more importantly, who benefits from that inefficiency? We've already seen the dramatic effects blogs can have on political news, media and reporting. What happens when users citizens are no longer satisfied just writing about the political process and want to get their hands dirty in the policy-making process itself?

Morning Coffee 96

• My friend David "LetsKillDave" Weller writes a long post on corporate blogging, responding to comments on the subject from Penny Arcade. Andre "Ozymandias" Vrignaud also responds. David is specifically talking about blogging within the gaming division, but they apply pretty broadly to Microsoft as a whole when it comes to blogging. "I don't want to get fired", "I don't want to do things that needlessly hurt my company" and "We can say things that PR or marketing people can't.  Or won't." all ring true to me.
• Speaking of gaming, there seems to be more that your average cool games coming our for Xbox 360 this summer. I just picked up Forza 2 which rocks with the Racing Wheel. The Darkness looks very cool and I laughed my ass off playing the Overlord demo. Both shipped this week and have gotten good reviews. On their way in August are Bioshock and Blue Dragon. Of course, there are a few other big games coming this holiday. A good, but expensive, year to be a gamer.
• I laughed my ass off reading Larry O'Brien's Top 10 Things To Do With Your Petaflop Supercomputer, esp. #9.
• WSDL 2.0, it's official. Nick Allen has the news. Personally, WSDL seems to be the spec most responsible for driving RPC-style request/response web services, so let's just say that I am not a fan.  
• Joe McKendrick thinks something is "holding back SOA"? I don't think it's any one thing, but certainly the RPC style that most web service toolkits pretty much force down your throat isn't helping.
• Nick Malik thinks Acropolis is promising as a SOA service consumer, but Udi Dalan thinks it doesn't support multi-threading well enough. I lean towards Nick on this one since I see multi-threading as a language problem, which a library like Acropolis can't solve on it's own.
• Jon Flanders has been busy building the BizTalk Server 2006 extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation (June CTP) SDK Sample. I'm not sure why the marketing folks gave this such a long and involved name, but the sample does look pretty cool. Paul Andrews has the project overview and demo video. However, given that the WF workflows are hosted in BTS, is it accurate to say "No Biztalk Experience Required"?
• Speaking of WF, Tomas Restrepo takes a detailed look at the new WF service hosting in .NET FX 3.5. Mostly, he likes what he sees. I have the same problem he does with the message correlation IDs. I'd like to have other options here, including support for what I call "message data correlation" (Tomas describes this as "natural correlating identifiers") and "address correlation" which is basically the REST model.

Morning Doughnuts 11

Harry will be back on Monday so I will returning to blogging on my website, while I will let the expert return to his normal posts here (not that he really took a break). I agree with Harry's post in that I really want to get something built so that we can talk about more than theoretical models. Like last time I appreciate the opportunity to sub for the master this last week. I hope that you found some of my entries interesting.

• Sam Gentile wrote the other day why it's great to be a Microsoft developer. I enjoyed that post because I just celebrated the end of my first year here at Microsoft. At this point I am not sure what I have contributed, but I have learned a great deal and want to apply that knowledge over the next year to help the company to succeed. We really do have great people and great technologies.
• The Seattle/Oklahoma City Sonics hired a GM who is only 30 years old. You know you must be getting old when the people running the sports teams are younger than you. He comes from the Spurs organization though so at least he has a background from a successful franchise.
• Ben Pearce listed out his top 5 questions about PowerShell this week at TechEd. He also recommends the book "PowerShell in Action" by Bruce Payette. I heartedly agree with this endorsement as the book is excellent.
• It looks like there are going to be more family friendly games for the XBOX360. I for one am glad to hear that. The other day as I was trying to find some games my 4 year old with the broken leg could play I realized how many games I have that wouldn't be appropriate for him. This is very good news in my opinion.

Morning Coffee 78

• Ian Griffiths posts a much longer version of "Even though the runtime supports multiple languages, most programmers are only fluent in one." (via Larkware)
• I wrote yesterday that Pat Helland's first post back was light on the tech talk. Luckily (for us) he takes the bus to work so he has plenty of time to write blog entries. Today's post is his "personal opinion about how computers suck". Money Quote: "We try too hard as an industry.  Frequently, we build big and expensive datacenters and deploy big and expensive computers. In many cases, comparable behavior can be achieved with a lot of crappy machines which cost less than the big expensive one."
• Steve Jones wrote that CRUD is CRAP. I agree 100%, but for additional reasons. Not only is it boooooring to write, it also delegates control outside of the service which I think is a mistake. Check out this post from Maarten Mullender who advised to do CRUD only when you can afford it.
• MIT Media Lab has created Scratch "a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web" targeted at kids 8 and up. It's a dynamic visual programming language that looks like Lego. Between Scratch, Boku and Phrogram I think my kids will have lots of fun learning to program like daddy does. (via GeekDad)
• Halo 3 is coming September 25th! I foresee lots of people calling in sick that day. And the next. And the rest of the week, etc. etc. etc.

Morning Coffee 73

• The MSDN folks have a utility for creating custom help files from the online MSDN library. I didn't realize MSDN even had a content service. This is tres useful.
• Jeff Atwood explains how error-filled the web is and how error-tolerant modern web browsers are. I've often argued that one of the keys to the rise of Visual Basic was because it was tolerant of sloppiness. It's hard to argue with Jeff's conclusion that "forgiveness by default is what works".
• BizTalk Labs shipped an update to the Connectivity Service. It "now supports simple publish and subscribe eventing. This allows multiple clients to subscribe to a service and receive notifications." Steve Maine has some details and a link to the MIX session he did with Don.
• Larry O'Brein is happy about IronRuby, but was hoping to see a new Ruby/C# hybrid language. Even though it's his "#1 administrative programming language", he specifically hopes for a new language so would "have the flexibility to evolve the language." But Larry, MSFT already had an dynamic administrative language that it can evolve! It's called PowerShell...
• The XNA folks have shipped a bunch of new content, including the Racing Game Starter Kit.
• Machinima is growing up fast. I just discovered iClone, a real-time 3D animation filmmaking tool. You know, my birthday is coming up later this month...

Morning Coffee 69

• John Shewchuk introduces the new BizTalk Services. Well, "new" is a bit of a misnomer: STS and Relay (now called Identity and Connectivity) were previously available under the Live Labs umbrella and the other new services they announced aren't available yet. Bt these new services they announced are compelling: ServiceBus is an pub/sub event delivery mechanism that scales to the internet and Workflow is a WF hosting solution. I'm looking forward to experimenting with these new services (when they become available).
• Nick Malik continues his series of posts on governance. Money quote: "Tools manage, People govern". I feel a little bad because I punted on the governance presentation that's he's preping, so maybe I'll get that on a bumper sticker for him or something.
• Chris Anderson has a few voice-over lines in Halo 3. While that's cool for him, he mentions a new feature I was unaware of: "the one thing that completely blew me away (aside from the graphics, animation, level design and new vehicles and weapons) was the ability to record a game and play it back on Xbox Live, freezing the action at any point and flying around the scene, Matrix style. It may sound just like a standard replay function, but take my word for it, it's not. I think it's revolutionary, and I predict that Halo 3 will take machinima to a whole new level." Cool!
• According to the XNA Team Blog, the new XNA GSE Refresh is now available. And as a thanks for our patience, they added four free months to all creator club members subscriptions. Thanks guys!

Morning Coffee 68

• My wife and I celebrated our seven year anniversary over the weekend. She rocks. 'Nuff said.
• Over the weekend, Gov.Gregoire signed a bill that protecting the rights of same-sex couples. It's not the same as full marriage rights (which long time readers know I fully support) but it's a step in the right direction.
• I picked up the Xbox 360 HD DVD player over the weekend. Rented Batman Begins and it looks awesome. However, it wasn't the stunning difference between standard and high def TV programming. I wonder if my five year old HDTV is showing it's age.
• Scott Guthrie continues his LINQ series with a post on the new Query Syntax in C#3/VB9. While this is feature is great for those who are using LINQ to SQL, it does force pretty much all LINQ to whatever providers to support the from-where-orderby-select pattern. But not all query sources want to be limited to that model. For example, if you wanted to do a LINQ to Data Warehouse, wouldn't you want more flexibility in your query syntax?
• I didn't realize Steve Jones had a blog. At least, I think this Steve Jones is the Steve Jones that I know. But I'm not sure. Either way, it looks good so I subscribed... (via Sam Gentile)

Morning Coffee 61

• Nick Malik wonders if architecture is code or if it's data? Frankly, I have nothing to add to this, but thought I should link to something Nick wrote since he's letting me share his office for the next few months while I'm engaged with one of the teams he mentions, though he begged me not to disclose which one. :)
• Ted Neward's Five Minute Management Lessons for Developers made me snicker.
• Xbox.com is running a new contest called "My Mom's a Gamer". Mine is. These days, it's mostly casual games on MSN Games, but back in the day she played both the Atari 2600 and Colecovision. She would play Space Invaders for hours. And curse. A lot. Most kids learned to curse on the playground, I learned from my mother.
• Mark Cuban claims the HDTV is the new PC. TV and PC technologies are certainly evolving as they merge, but will that platform be as open as the desktop PC or the browser? It better be.
• According to Nick Carr, Citigroup is looking to cut $4.6 billion in spending over the next three years and that IT will be one of the "cornerstones" (i.e. hardest hit) of that effort. I had a chat with an Meta analyst in Australia a few years ago who suggested that IT spending was going to go thru an innovator's dilemma phase. Huge companies (like Citi) with huge IT budgets are facing significant competition from small companies that can't afford huge IT budgets. These smaller companies get used to running a tighter ship and tend to be more competitive as they grow and are able to directly face off against the big fish.

Afternoon Coffee 59

Friday's Morning Coffee didn't happen because I fraked up the DNS settings when I moved devhawk.net to a new registrar. Today's morning coffee was drastically delayed on account of car troubles. Tuesday, I have an 8am meeting so tomorrow's not looking good either.

• The big news for Xbox 360 is details on the Spring Update. Big news is WLMessenger integration + a QWERTY thumb pad that snaps right into the controller. (via Gamerscoreblog and Major Nelson)
• Speaking of Xbox, I completed the Old Spice Experience Challenge today on my lunch break (couldn't go to the office due to the car troubles). My reward is an upgrade to level 2, a gamerpic I'll never use and a free copy of Contra. (Estimated total value: $5)
• Scott Guthrie continues his series on new language features in C#3/VB9. This time it's lambda expressions. This is the "killer" feature in the new language version IMHO, since you can use lambda expressions either as code or data. Furthermore, it's up to the class/method handling the lambda expression to decide if it should be treated as code or data. That decision is made and design time, but the upside is that as a developer, I write my queries exactly the same way regardless if they are to be executed directly (aka code) or analyzed (aka data). Scott also metions a few new LINQ to * projects: LINQ to Amazon, LINQ to NHibernate and LINQ to LDAP.
• Speaking of LINQ to *, here's LINQ to 3D Objects in a C# ray tracer. I think it's safe to say that LINQ to *whatever* is the new hotness. (via DotNetKicks)
• The new version of F# is out. Looks like the big new feature is Active Patterns which is described in this draft paper. If I only had more time to investigate this. (via Don Syme)
• For the third time in the past six months, my laptop power supply has died. I've never had a problem like this before, much less three times. It's not even the same laptop as I recently moved over to a Tecra M4 Tablet. I just don't get it.
• P&P has shipped the 3.0 release of Enterprise Library. Tom Hollander has the details. Personally, I am most interested in the new Policy Injection Block.
• Having worked with self-signed certificates and understanding what a PITA they are, it's nice to see that IIS 7 has explicit support for them.
• I saw a reference to "The Halo Effect" on one of the political blogs I read. Needless to say, as an Xbox gamer, my first reaction was that this had something related to Master Chief. It doesn't.
• Joe McKendrick compares SOA governance to national governance. Given our polarized political climate, this analogy may hurt more than it helps. Also, the next enterprise architectural board that has equal "branch" footing with IT and executive management will be the first.

Morning Coffee 56

• I survived the weekend no problem. My wife has the details of what she did for the weekend while I played Mr. Mom. The kids were great, we even went to see the Easter Bunny on Sunday. Wish the weather had been better, but we did get to go on a little walk around the neighborhood between hailstorms Sunday after naps.
• Between taking the kids all morning until Jules got home from the airport and going to opening day for a team morale event, I worked about 30 minutes yesterday. In case you're wondering, that's way below average. I typically work at least twice that every day. :)
• After maintaining a post a day average for January and February, I slipped a bit in March. Twenty seven posts in thirty one days. So that puts me five posts behind for the year as of this one.
• Dale let me borrow Madden 07 for the weekend so I could pump my gamerscore (a practice called gamerscore whoring). I still need 255 points by April 22nd to complete the Old Spice Experience Challenge. I'm not proud of it, but it's not like I have much time to play these days.
• Mads Kristensen has a new .NET blog engine intuitively called BlogEngine.NET. I wonder how it compares to dasBlog, which powers DevHawk. (via DotNetKicks)
• I wrote a last week that unit test support should be in the Express editions of VS. Thanks to Jamie Cansdale, it is. (via Larkware)
• Scott Hanselman saved his C# Tiny OS project from the impending shutdown of GDN and reposted it to his blog. I first met Scott at TechEd Malaysia 2002, so I remember seeing him present this "back in the day".
• EMI is going to start offering songs sans DRM @ $1.29 a pop. Assuming other labels follow suit, this is gonna be huge. (via Loke Uei) 
• Jomo Fisher writes about using LINQ as a string switch compiler that's about 900% faster than using a hash table. Money quote: "Any time I see a data structure with a capability I’m not using it makes me wonder whether I can trade that capability for something I do need—in this case a speed boost." LINQ is turning out to be much more interesting than just a (much) better way to query databases. (via DotNetKicks)

Morning Coffee 54

• The black Xbox 360 Elite is official. Details on Gamerscore and Major Nelson.
• Jamie Fristrom of Torpex Games writes about XNA and the approval process for making an Xbox Live Arcade game. At the end of his post, he confirms that his team is using a "pre-pre-alpha" version of XNA Game Studio Professional. I wonder how long before that's widely available?
• Politics 2.0 Advice: When building your MySpace page, don't use images hosted on other peoples servers. John McCain found out the hard way. (via Balloon Juice)
• Speaking of Politics 2.0, you can check out the Roots Project, described as "a social networking site for people with progressive values, allowing them to form their own groups, sharing information and best practices nationally while acting together locally." (via firedoglake)

Morning Coffee 53

• The Virtual PC 2007 virtual video card seems to max out @ 1600 x 1200 resolution. Given that the two screens on my main dev workstation are 1200x1600 (i.e. portait mode) and 1680x1050, it means I can't run VPC in full screen on my dev box. I can get close on the widescreen monitor, but I like writing code on the portain monitor better. Luckily, I can use remote desktop instead the built in VPC display window in order to get full screen on either monitor.
• Soma announces the aquisition and immediate (i.e. free) availability of Teamplain web client for VSTS as part of Visual Studio's 10th birthday. We're also "publishing the Orcas Wave (Orcas + Rosario) roadmap for VSTS." I'll be interested to see the reaction to that. Mike's reaction to the schedule was: "That's insane".
• THe XNA tools just keep coming. Allegorithmic's MaPZone texture creation tool is free to XNA developers. Actually, it looks like it's free for everyone, as a carrot to upgrade to their procedural texture tool ProFX. Still, free tools are still free. (via Michael Klucher)
• Can I get 1200U of rackspace, to go? Apparently, yes. (via Half My Brain)
• Watched the season finale of Battlestar Galactica last night. Wow, is there a better show on TV right now? (yes, one: Lost. But that's it) When it ended, my wife said "We have to wait until 2008 for a new episode? That sucks". I couldn't agree more.

Morning Coffee 49

• The eBay Architecture SD Forum presentation that spawned the whole Transactionless meme is available here. As I reported yesterday, it doesn't call for going completely transactionless as Martin suggested. It calls for going without distributed transactions, which I agree with 100%.
• More interesting than the transactional aspects, I found the data tier functional segmentation information facinating. Too bad those guys aren't using our platform, SSB was expressly designed for exactly this sort of segmentation. I also liked that step 1 for "massively scaling J2EE" is to "throw out most of J2EE".
• After going mostly dark since last august, the manager of my old team John deVadoss has been blogging up a storm since the beginning of March. So has my old boss Mike Platt. I wonder what happened at the begining of March? Here's hoping this blogging fever spreads on my old team.
• Joe McKendrick: "The bottom line is that ROI on SOA is an enterprise challenge, not an IT challenge." Truer words are rarely spoken.
• The rumor mill on the Black Xbox 360 "Elite" are coming fast and furious. I don't care about the HDMI port (my HDTV is five years old and doesn't have one) but I would like a bigger hard drive...

Morning Coffee 42

Ever since I got back from vacation, it's been all about the Morning Coffee. I'm happy to be getting a daily post out, but I haven't written anything deep in several weeks now. My one non-MC post in the past two weeks was The Virtuous Cycle of Virtual Platforms which frankly I wrote over a year ago for internal usage and adapted for my blog after reading Dare's post.

One of the reasons for my lack of "deep" posting recently is post vacation re-engagement. Also, things at work that I can't blog about (yet) have been taking my attention. But I worry that this daily MC post is causing me to focus on "shallow" blog topics. Since I'm trying to average a post per day, that means at least two non-MC posts every week. Of course, more than two non-MC posts a week would be just fine.

• On the XNA Team Blog, Michael Klucher announces the XNA Game Studio Express Update is coming in April. Among the new features are Vista compatibility, 3D audio, bitmap fonts, game icons and most interesting the sharing of compiled XNA games. Currently, the only way to share something you build with XNA with the community is by sharing the source code, which is less than optimal. For more, check out the XNA GSE Overview presentation by Mitch Walker from GDC.
• Speaking of gaming consoles, Sony's "big" announcement is a Second Life clone? Kotaku thinks "this is going to be one of those features that people didn't realize that wanted until they get it." Personally, I doubt that very much, but what do I know about game consoles? I just play, man.
• Jafar Husain suggests a way to do Ruby symbols in C# 3.0. Sort of. He defines an extension method that returns the name of the property defined in a lambda function. On the plus side, it's strongly typed. On the minus side, "this.GetPropertySymbol(o => o.Name)" isn't as easy to type as ":Name". (via DotNetKicks)
• While pseudo-symbol support is fairly verbose, Scott Guthrie goes thru some of the new language features for terser syntax: automatic properties, object initializes and collection initializes. While I like object and collection initializes, I'm not really sold on automatic properties. Personally, I like the VS prop snippet approach, where you automate the creation of the property once time when it's authored rather than leaving the shortcut syntax in the code in perpetuity.

Morning Coffee 38

• As predicted, the XNA guys had a bunch of news to announce at GDC. They launched the XNA Creators Club Online with samples, forums and a new starter kit. Also they announced some cool partnerships for Creators Club Premium members (aka the folks who paid $99 a year to be able to run code on their Xbox 360) including access to the highly anticipated Torque X Engine.
• From Don Syme, we here that the new 1.9 version of F# is almost ready. When I shifted from learning F# to learning PowerShell, it wasn't because of a sudden lack of interest in F#, so I'm glad to see them still chugging along. And by the time they release 2.0 later this year, I hope to have learned enough PowerShell that I can spend some time focusing on learning F#.
• Apparently Jenny Lam at Microsoft reviewed more than 10,000 images to pick the new Vista Wallpapers. Not sure if I would love or hate that job. But some that didn't make the cut are available online. (via DotNetKicks)
• Tomas Restrepo reviews a number of lightweight, syntax-highlighting text editors. Personally, I like Notepad2, but as Tomas mentions there's no way to save your settings. Also, there's no way to add new syntax highlighting without recompiling it. For example, Wesner Moise compiled a version that added Ruby syntax. I really want a version that that supports PowerShell. Maybe it's time to give Notepad++ a closer look
• Dale has some new SOAhlocis Anonymous shirts available.
• Jeff Atwood discovers that the French acronym for object oriented programming is POO.

Morning Doughnuts 5

• Joel Dehlin, a former Microsoft employee and the CIO of the LDS church is conducting a series of tech talks. The next one is being planned for the bay area. If you are interested you can respond to his post here. The dates would be between April 22 - 26 with a tentative agenda as follows:
• Keynote
• Infrastructure breakout
• Development breakout
• Interaction Design breakout
• Community breakout
• Building to building video breakout
• Everything needs a 12 step program now. CNN has a 12 step program to cure your email addiction here. I started thinking about this after Harry's post saying he had hit zero email bounce prior to going on his secret mission.
• I read an interesting blog on XNA and how it fits into Microsoft's strategy in gaming. I am not sure I agree with all of the points, but I found the arguments to be compelling.
• My BYU Cougars are now up to 21 in the AP Poll. I can't think of a year when both the football and basketball teams have both had such successful seasons.
• Between today and tomorrow I will be finalizing my vision document for how I think monitoring should work in the Service-Oriented Infrastructure project I am on. As I was outlining my vision it really hit me how much there is to do.

Morning Doughnuts 4

• According to Reuters surgeons who play video games are more skilled. Remind me to ask the doctor if s/he owns an XBOX 360 the next time I am getting operated on.
• I have reached the National Championship game in dynasty mode of NCAA Football 2007. The opponent of my BYU Cougars...why that would be Harry's alma mater, the USC Trojans. Funny how that worked out.
• Nicholas Allen writes in his blog about when you should use Indigo to write a channel, and more importantly when you should not. As most of you know Harry and I are doing quite a bit of work with WCF so we are interested in this type of advice.
• Our team has been thinking about how to manage a large number of services in an automated fashion. This would include deploying new services, monitoring the services, automatically handling scaling, service discovery, and automated provisioning to name a few possible capabilities. I almost think of it like the next version of UDDI, especially when it comes to provisioning. I think that as systems become more distributed that the ability to automatically manage these systems is going to be key to their success. I know that some thought has already gone on in this area by people far smarter than I, but as I consider how to operate an infrastructure with thousands of services in it it is apparent that the opportunity is there for us to design and implement a system management framework that automates the majority of the tasks. I need to spend some time to consider how the framework would work, and document the capabilities.

Morning Coffee 28

• From the "Ask and ye shall receive" department: A couple weeks ago I wondered how good or bad my Gamerscore conversion rate is. MyGamerCard.net just launched a completion leaderboard where they rank you on your Gamerscore times your completion rate.
• Shane Courtrille pointed out that the prize you receive in from the Xbox Rewards program gets better if your Gamerscore is higher. With a meager 1090 points, I'm in level 1. But those with 10,000+ or more can get a copy of Fuzion Frenzy 2 for completing the challenge.
• Yesterday, I complained that code in my RSS feed looks awful. It appears to be a problem with dasBlog. In validating the HTML is actually XHTML, it screws up the white space. Of course, usually that's not a big deal, but inside a <pre> tag, it is. Until I get a chance to submit a patch to dasBlog to fix this, I'm using CodeHTMLer, which has a "convert white space" option that doesn't use the <pre> tag at all. As a bonus, it even support PowerShell! Note, you have to use the website, not their WLWriter plugin, if you want the convert white space option.
• There's a new beta of Ruby.NET available. Now that I've moved on to PowerShell, I'm only slightly interested in Ruby these days. If I can figure out how to create internal DSLs with PS, what would I need Ruby for? (via Larkware)
• My old team just shipped a single-instance multi-tenancy SaaS sample called LitwareHR. Details are on Gianpaolo's blog, code is up on CodePlex.

Morning Coffee 27

• Is there a good solution to colorize source code that looks good in RSS feeds? I've tried Insert Code and Paste from VS for WL Writer and both look fine in HTML but awful in RSS.
• My friend David Geller launched his latest venture Eyejot recently. Eyejot is a Flash-based video messaging system, so you can send and receive video clips without having to install anything but a webcam. According to the Eyejot blog, they're getting some good press. See an interview with David about Eyejot up on YouTube.
• Here's an interesting article on using WF with Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. Invoking MTurk isn't that interesting - it's just a web service and WF has a built-in InvokeWebService activity. But since MTurk has no way to asynchronously call out to the WF, you have no choice but to regularly poll MTurk to see if the task is complete. Yuck. (via Larkware)
• Yahoo! Pipes looks interesting. At least the screen shots of it on various websites and blogs look cool. Too bad the site is absolutely hammered this morning. (via Dare Obasanjo)
• Like GAT? Like DSL? Then use them together!
• If I can more than raise my Gamerscore by 1,500 points by April 12th (i.e. more than double it), I can get a free $5 game. But why wait to start the contest until next Monday? Doesn't that discourage people from playing until then?

Morning Coffee 16

• Forgot to say this yesterday, but I'm happy the Colts are in the Super Bowl. Well, I guess I'm more happy that New England isn't in it. They've won it enough lately. I wish the Saints has made it, but at least this way I have no question who to root for on Super Bowl Sunday.
• My Gamerscore cracked 1000 over the weekend. I got 60 points in Dead Rising and 100 points in NHL 07. I have played ten games + three arcade games for a maximum possible Gamerscore of 10,600 and a Gamerscore "conversion rate" of 10.28%. I wonder how good that is? All the leader boards I've seen rate purely on Gamerscore.
• Speaking of games, Obsidian (of Neverwind Nights fame) is working on an Aliens RPG! Check out this post by Chris Avellone of Obsidian on Game Design Research (via Game Tycoon).
• Richard Grimes' .NET Instrumentation Workshop rocks. Richard also has extensive workshops on .NET Security and .NET Fusion (aka runtime binding). If they're as good as the instrumentation workshop, they're worth a read.
• In my SSB/WF prototypes, I've simply been writing to the console. The lo-tech brute force works okay for a console app, but not at all when I move my code into a shared library. So I decided to bite the bullet now and translate the Console.WriteLine calls into TraceSource calls. My prototype isn't that big (yet), but it went pretty smooth nonetheless. I currently have three TraceSources in my solution - one for the host, one for my SSB activities & workflow service and one for the persistence engine (I just inherited from SqlWorkflowPersistenceService and added the trace calls). I'm sure in time, I'll wish I had set up my TraceSources differently, but for now it works.
• The one feature I lost moving from Console.WriteLine to TraceSources was color support. Since I am creating voluminous tracing data, I used color coding to indicate which part of the application the trace information was coming from. Of course, the OOB ConsoleTraceListener doesn't have any mechanism to color code the output. I hacked up a ColorConsoleTraceListener in a couple of minutes that worked great. I say "hacked" because my color choosing code is currently hard coded, rather than being stored the config file. If I get the time to change that, I'll post the code here.
• While researching ASP.NET's Membership system, I found this Scott Guthrie post with links to ASP.NET providers for MySql, Oracle and SQLite. I've wondered about the lack of a simple file-based ASP.NET role/membership provider and even started hacking together an XML based one. But the availability of a .NET SQLite data provider makes that an interesting option. XML would be human readable, but porting the existing SQL providers to SQLite would probably be easier.
• Politics 2.0 in action: Talking Points Memo is enouraging you (aka Time Magazine's Person of the Year) to record your own response to tonight's State of the Union. Basically record your response via camcorder, webcam or cellphone. Then upload it to YouTube and add it to the TPM SOTU group. With President Bush's approval rating at all time lows, I'm guessing these videos will be venting some of the pent up hostility towards this administration.

(Late) Morning Coffee 9

Took part of the morning off this morning to let the sun shine down on the icy roads. No major incidents getting to work, though the office parking lot is like an ice rink.

• As mentioned yesterday, I finally got my STS implementation working with WCS. Turns out that using WCS with the wsFederatedHttp binding requires you to specify which claims you want to send to the service. In comparison, using WCS with wsHttpBinding automatically requests the PPID claim. It would be nice if this was documented somewhere. I only figured it out by finding this demo from Michele.
• Last week, I said that we need a better tool than SvcConfigEditor. This tool is only marginally better than hand-editing the config files with intellisense. A "real" tool would keep you from building invalid config files. While I appreciate the need for this level of flexibility at the transport layer, we really need a better web service hosting story than IIS + ASP.NET + web.config. WCF makes me long for the days of the MTS/COM+ GUI interface. I never wasted hours troubleshooting config issues with MTS/COM+.
• Apparently, Xbox 360 outsold Wii and PS3 combined in December. That's probably more of a statement about PS3 and Wii shortages, but there's no arguing with numbers like 10.4 million Xbox 360 consoles, 5 millions Xbox Live users, and nearly 3 million copies of Gears of War. Congrats to the Xbox team!
• David may be hiding from his blog of late, but he did venture out long enough to point me to SOA Facts. My favorite: Dante has a special level in hell for consultants whose resumes do not say SOA.

Morning Coffee 7

News was expecting inches, but we only got a dusting of snow last night.

• We had dinner last night with my old friend Matt, who moved to Amsterdam a year and a half ago and is getting to travel the world. Kids didn't have a nap yesterday, so they weren't quite on their best behavior, but it was great to see Matt. Hopefully it won't be another 18 months before we see him again.
• For the second time in four months, the power cable for my laptop failed. I wonder if there is something wrong with the power supply that's causing the cable to fail? At least this time I wasn't in Canada.
• There's a high resolution video of the Xbox 360 IPTV up on Xbox.com's CES page. They make it very clear this is "something you need to get from your service provider". Telling quote: "It's kinda like what I have today, but better". Doesn't seem that much better, so far anyway.
• I'm knee deep in WCF security code again. Mucking about with X.509 certificates sucks. I tried to follow these directions to create a dev root CA certificate as well as dev certs signed by said dev root CA, but I get security negotiation errors because the system can't check to see if the cert has been revoked. I guess I'll just install Certificate Services instead
• My nominee for best new acronym: JBOWS (Just a Bunch of Web Services), apparently coined by Joe McKendrick. Web services, to date at least, seem like they're being used primarily for building distributed applications, rather than a loosely coupled services. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, unless you're fooling yourself (or those holding the purse strings) that you'll get integration "automagically" or "for free" just because you're using web services. Joe McKendrick is definitely not an SOA-hole.
• The next new language I learn will be F#. Just not sure when or how.

Morning Coffee 6

"The paper sure loves to talk about
Selling out
Some of us never get the chance"
Stick Around by Mr. Jones and the Previous

• Didn't see that coming. I guess the Buckeyes didn't either. Congrats to the Gators. That makes at least three championships in a row won by the underdog. For all the complaining about the BCS, it's hard to argue they got the champion wrong this year. However, with the exception of the Fiesta Bowl, the BCS games weren't very good this year.
• There's a video of the new Xbox 360 IPTV service up on 10. I realize it's a demo and we're nearly a year away from release, but I'm not impressed. Xbox 360 Fanboy pointed to a blogger who got a deeper look at the service at Microsoft's CE booth. Frankly, it doesn't look or sound like it's much different than standard cable service (though I like the sound of 35Mbps bandwidth at my house). I realize familiarity is good, but do we really have to lock ourselves into the existing TV paradigm?
• I got roped into a webcast today on Optimizing Application Platform Infrastructure. It's at 11am Pacific time. Stop by and say hi.
• My colleague Dale has a rant about Service Oriented Assholes. His definition: "Any person or team that pontificates on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) without considering the realities of implementing SOA in a real business environment with real suppliers, customers, and products. These people are great at designing something on a white board or on paper, but couldn't produce a real workable production ready system if their life depended on it." Sort of a more specific (and vulgar) version of Joel's "Architecture Astronauts". How many SOA-holes do you know?

Morning Coffee 5

I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord
I've been waiting for this moment, all my life, oh Lord
Can you feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord, oh Lord
In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins
Covered by Nonpoint on the Miami Vice Soundtrack

• It was a tough weekend in the Pierson house. For several hours on Saturday, we thought we were going to have to put our dog D'art down. My wife has the details, but the good news is that he had spine trauma, but nothing broken and he seems to be back on his way to his old self.
• I grew up in Northern Virginia, so I'm a long time member of the Dallas Cowboy Hater's Club. So watching them snatch defeat from the jaws of victory against my adopted Seahawks was sweet.
• Last night, Bill Gates kicked off CES with the usual assortment of product news and announcements. The biggest news, in my opinion anyway, is IPTV support for Xbox 360. (Did you know MSFT has a TV product division?) Details are fairly scarce at this point, but I'm hoping this allows for independent broadcasters to directly reach consumers, much like blogs have done for independent writers. Can I use IPTV to launch my own TV channel? Imagine the possibilities. I'd like a Washington Capitals channel, so I can watch post game highlights on my big screen TV rather than on my computer. A Rooster Teeth channel would also be nice.
• No coding this past weekend, though I did reinstall XNA Game Studio Express on my recently paved dev partition. I tried playing Lego Star Wars II with my son over the weekend and he's still having trouble learning how to use the controller. I was thinking I might try making some simple "games" to help him learn.

Morning Coffee 1

I gave up drinkin', I gave up smokin'
I gave up thinkin' all the time, stone cold revoken
No reason to my rhyme, I wasn't jokin'
If there's a phony bone in me, I want it broken
"Rub It In" by All Day Sucker

I'm trying to write more in 2007. Here's a roundup of stuff rattling around my brain:

• Fight On! So much for Michigan and their bleating about being left out of the championship game. Also, massive congrats to Boise State.
• Santa did bring me free time this holiday, but I spent it playing games rather than writing them. I'm digging Gears (big surprise) and Dead Rising, and I've starting playing Viva Pinata with Patrick. Plus, I finished GRAW which I had on loan from a friend just in time to start playing Vegas. Note I said "free time" which is to say time when I wasn't hanging out with my family. Typically during naps or after everyone was in bed, though I did skip at least one birthday party to play instead.
• We had a "surprise" snow storm two days after Christmas. Not enough to be dangerous driving, but enough to make a snowman with my kids. It's still there, though now that it's 55 degrees, I'm guessing it will be totally melted by the time I get home from work. It's been melting a little bit each day, so it's been like watching the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark in slow motion.
• My wife and I finished watching season 5 of Alias last night. Fun, though it had really jumped the shark by Season 5. We watched the entire series on DVD, which really makes me wonder about the future of broadcast TV. We watched season 1 of Lost on DVD but we've been watching on TV ever since. I'm hooked on Lost, so there's no way I could go back to DVDs at this point, but I'm thinking that DVD is a better way to go for most TV. I wonder how this will change TV storytelling.
• I wish I could see how a show like Lost or Alias evolves over time. How much of the Rimbaldi story arc was mapped out before the show started? How did the production team deal with forced changes like Jennifer Garner's pregnancy or the apparently surprise series cancellation?
• I had 12 days off for the holidays, so it's very tough to be back at work. As I suggested above, I did very little coding while I was off, so getting back in the saddle won't be easy. It's especially hard on my little boy that I'm back to work. He was acting up yesterday which is fairly unusual. I finally asked him if he was sad about me going back to work and he broke down crying. I'm very lucky to be a part of such a tight knit family.
• I've been in my "new" job for six months, but it seems like longer. I mean that in a good way. It feels like I fit better in this job, on a much smaller team, actually building stuff instead of just "evangelizing" it. Nothing against evangelism, I just think I burned out on that job.

So starts a new feature on DevHawk. As you might guess from the "1" in the title, I'm hoping to make this a regular feature. As I ease back into work, expect more tech related nuggets along with the more random stuff. I should admit, however, that I actually don't drink coffee. :)

Good Week for Hobbyists and Students

Both XNA Game Studio Express and Microsoft Robotics Studio shipped their 1.0 releases this week. So once you're done hacking a robot to mow your lawn, you can relax by debugging your latest game on your Xbox 360. W00t!

Santa, please bring me a few extra hours per day so I can play with this stuff!

Hawkeye on XBL Video Marketplace

As per Major Nelson's blog, the XBL Video Marketplace went live yesterday. Being off work yesterday (vacation time: use it or lose it), I fired up the ol' 360 to have a look see for myself. V for Vendetta in HD? Cool. 6GB? Not so cool. Guess I'll have to blow away some of the demos that I'm not playing in order to make space.

The amount of HD space needed for HD movies begs the question, why isn't Video Marketplace available for PC? My 20GB of Xbox HD space is taken up with game demos and downloads. But my home PC(s) can spare that kind of space. I'd much rather download the content to my PC then stream it across my home network to the 360 when I want to watch it. Not sure how DRM (I assume the content uses WM DRM) impacts network streaming, but I would guess that's a solvable problem.

While I'm talking about DRM, why do I have to pay to download DRMed rental content? Shouldn't I pay when it's time to actually watch the content? I understand having a time limit (24 hours) to finish watching content I rented, but why is there a time limit (14 days) to start watching it? Once it's downloaded it, I'm no longer using XBL resources, so why put any limit on it at all?

The pricing model seems pretty much in line with iTunes and/or Blockbuster. $2 to own a TV show, $3 to rent a "classic" movie, $4 to rent a new release movie, with a 50% markup for HD content ($3/$4.50/$6). While these prices are pretty typical, where's the all-you-can-watch subscription plan? The all-you-can-listen model is one of the key values of Zune or PlaysForSure services like Napster and Urge not to mention NetFlix. I'd probably scrap my premium channel cable plan if I could get an unlimited subscription to XBL Video Marketplace.

I'd also like to see more content pricing tiers. Owning a 45 minute CSI for $2 seems pretty fair. But $2 for an 11 minute Space Ghost Coast to Coast seems overpriced. And while I'm making requests, how about making it easy to buy an entire season of a given show – both from a pricing perspective (i.e. a discount for buying an entire season) as well as a user experience perspective (i.e. one click to buy the whole season).

So all in all, a pretty cool service with some room for improvement. The availability of significant amounts of good HD content is a MAJOR winner for this service and a great foundation to build on. Like all things XBL related, I assume Video Marketplace will evolve over time. Can't wait to see how it goes.

Patrick and Daddy's Xbox

Last night, after his sister had gone to bed, my three year old son Patrick and I spent some time playing on "daddy's Xbox". He wants Cars and Viva Pinata for Christmas, but I fired up the Sonic the Hedgehog demo and handed him the controller. He's only three, so he would basically run around in a circle and jump until he fell off the very tall tower the demo starts on. He enjoyed it, but he was also a little discouraged because he wasn't very good at the game.

That got me thinking about what kind of games would be good for him. He's not that good with the controller yet, so fighting bad guys or navigating a ledge on a tall tower are not great bets. Likewise, three year olds aren't that good at focusing on a specific goal like "pick up all the rings" but would rather just explore the world. Viva Pinata sounds like it's right on target for Patrick (plus, he likes the TV show). But what other games really fit the bill? Not many. Patrick loves Cars - he wants to be Lightning McQueen so bad - but I'm not sure he's going to be any good at the game.

I wonder if there's much of a market for pre-school console games? Probably not at the $50-60 price point, but as a $5 or $10 Xbox Live Arcade game? Maybe so. I've played around with XNA Game Studio, but I haven't really been inspired to build anything. Maybe I've been looking in the wrong place for inspiration!

Update: My father had a great suggestion. Patrick loves Handy Manny and Bob the Builder, so how about some type of Mr. Fix It game where you can go around building and repairing stuff. Sort of Grand Theft Auto with tools, but for three year olds.

New Version of Gamer Card Writer Plugin

There's a new version of WL Writer, so I spent a little time updating my Gamer Card Writer Plugin. The big addition in this version is support for the different card styles from MyGamerCard.net. Also, I added a preview, so you can see what the card will look like before you insert it into your post.

Rather than post it here, I submitted it to the Windows Live Gallery, since they've added an area for Writer Plugins. You can download it from there.

Gamer Card Plugin for WL Writer

In my last post, I wanted to include a link to my gamer card, showing the NHL 07 logo on it. It turns out that in addition to the "official" gamer card from Xbox.com, there's also the MyGamerCard.net site which provides both image and flash versions of gamer cards. Since I'm using Windows Live Writer, and I hear it's really easy to extend, I decided to throw together a plugin for inserting Gamer Cards. It was, as advertised, extremely easy. I spent more time laying out the dialog box than I did writing the code to interface with WL Writer.

The plug in provides basically five Gamer Card options:

• Standard Xbox.com Gamer Card
• MGC.net Gamer Card image with link to Xbox.com Profile
• MGC.net Gamer Card image with link to MGC.net Profile
• MGC.net Gamer Card image only
• MGC.net Gamer Card flash movie

I'm interested in feedback and suggestions for future versions. MyGamerCard.net provides ten different Gamer Card styles (that's my Gamer Card in the "H2O" style to the left) so that's an obvious enhancement for another day. I'd also like to evolve the plugin into a "Smart Content Source", which allows you to edit the content after it's been created (like the default "Insert Map" option). Finally, I'm thinking of adding support for GamerScoreChart.com.

Download GamerCard.WriterPlugin.Setup.zip (142.41 KB) and enjoy. Let me know what you think.

Hawkeye on NHL 07

For those who don't keep a close eye on my Xbox playing habits, I picked up NHL 07 last night. There are two hockey franchises for the Xbox 360: EA Sports and 2K Sports. I've been a 2K fan for several years, but I didn't think much of their last effort on Xbox so I never bothered to pick the 360 version. Of course, EA Sports skipped the 360 last year so I've been without next-gen hockey since I bought my next-gen console.

Now there's a new version of both major hockey franchises, just in time for the opening of training camps. Each has had an entire year to innovate, and it's interesting to see where each title has spent that time. 2K Sports has created "Cinemotion", which is an entirely new presentation system which is more like an "interactive hockey movie" than a TV broadcast.

EA Sports spent their time on an entirely new control scheme called "Skill Stick". Basically, while the left thumbstick still controls player movement, the right thumbstick controls the player's stick. It's taking time to get used to - hey I've only had the game a few hours - but so far I really like it. I was playing the XBLM Demo and scored on a sweet spinorama move with the skill stick. That pretty much hooked me on the spot. Most of the reviewers have singled out the skill stick as the reason for the generally favorable reviews. 

Plus, EA picked Washington Capitals superstar Alex Ovechkin for their cover athlete. Barring awful reviews, I pretty much decided to pickup NHL 07 as soon as I heard that.

October is for Lost and BSG

Wednesday Oct 4th is the season premier for Lost. Two days later on Oct 6th is the season premier of Battlestar Galactica. These are my favorite two shows - an in my opinion the best two - on TV right now. According to Major Nelson, a one hour recap of BSG called "The Story So Far" is available on XBLM. If they could post a Lost and the Lost Experience recap on XBLM, that would just be perfect.

Hawk Eye on Xbox 360

Last weekend, I finally got around to picking up an Xbox 360. Things have been a little busy this week so I haven’t had a ton of time to play it. I bought Oblivion and Kameo, but have spent most of my time playing Xbox Live Arcade. Seems sort of stupid to shell out $400 to play Hexic and UNO, but it actually a compelling experience for a number of reasons. First off, they’re games you can play for 10-15 minutes at a time. Playing Oblivion for 15 minutes is pointless, but it’s perfect for a Live Arcade game. With two kids, 15 minutes of play time is much more common than 2 hours. Second, you don’t have to get up to put in a game disc. Sure it’s lazy, but aren’t we all lazy sometimes? Third, I can play them in front of my kids. Fourth, they’re cheap and easy to download on Xbox Live Marketplace.

Marketplace is a thing of genius. My son Patrick’s favorite is the Cars movie trailer in HD. Being able to download demos is awesome, rather than keeping track of the discs that come with OXM. For example, I’ve downloaded every racing game demo there is so Patrick can play them. He hasn’t got the hang of it yet (he is only three) but since it’s a demo it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t care that he keeps racing the same car on the same track. (He did see the new Cars game at Blockbuster the other day, but it’s for the original Xbox and not on the back compat list.)

Finally, the ability to play music and look at pictures from a standard XP machine is pretty cool. The User Experience for lots of photos and music isn’t great, but the end result is worth it. My wife quipped “I could watch this all night” as we looked at a slide show of photos we’ve taken over the past three years while listening to some of custom tunes. I don’t have a Media Center as I’ve been waiting for HD cable support. However, I know the MCE experience for navigating thousands of songs and photos is much better than Xbox 360’s, so I might make the switch early. Plus, I would also get support for remote video viewing – something Xbox 360 doesn’t support for reasons that escape me.

All in all, I'm really digging the Xbox 360. Only downside is not enough time to play.