Thursday, December 13, 2007

Morning Coffee 130

• Michael Klucher announces the release of XNA Game Studio 2.0 and Major Nelson points to the press release announcing the release. You can get the bits from XNA Creators Club Online (the XNA dev center has yet to be updated).
• Speaking of XNA, David Weller points out the warm-up challenge for Dream-Build-Play 2008. I assume networking will be a big part of this years' entries, but the warm-up challenge is to "Create a new and innovative use of Artificial Intelligence in a game".
• Still speaking of XNA, Gamasutra has an interview with XNA GM Chris Satchell where he hints at a publishing channel for XNA games on the Xbox 360, with "full details" coming sometime in the new year.
• The Capitals beat the Rangers in overtime last night. Since changing coaches on Thanksgiving, they're 6-3-1. That's great, but they're still five games under .500. The good news is that even though the Caps tied for last in the league, they're only six points out of a playoff spot with about fifty games left in the season.
• My old team puts on an event every year called the Strategic Architects Forum. It's invite-only, but they've posted some of the videos, slides and transcripts from this year's event.
• J.D. Meier discusses the new Guidance Explorer release. They're now up to 3,000 "nuggets" of guidance and they've moved the guidance store to MSDN. (via Sam Gentle)
• Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz explains further why arbitrary tier-splitting is bad. I'd also suggest reading Chapter 7 of PoEAA which provides another version of the same story: You can't take an object that's designed for fine-grained local access and make it remote without really screwing yourself up.
• Eric Lippert thinks immutable data structures are "the way of the future in C#" so he's written a series on immutability. Posts include kinds of immutability, an immutable stack, an immutable covariant stack and an immutable queue. As I've discussed, immutable data structures are HUGE in functional programming. Eric's immutable stacks and queues are similar to F#'s native list type. (via Jomo Fisher)