Rob Caron has the scoop…as usual. MS is building a game specific version of VSTS called XNA Studio. From the press release, sounds like a bunch of additional features primarily around digital asset management. I wonder if such tools will be available to mere non-game-coding mortals?

So I’m experimenting with this podcasting stuff. I started by listening to a few podcasts – primarily Daily Source Code and Mike’s Manic Minute - and using Doppler to pull these down to my Zen Micro. But then I started expanding out a bit – adding Ron Jacobs and Major Nelson – and I started to hit issues w/ the software. Of course, not everyone tags their podcasts with the same metadata style. Given the way the Zen Micro works, I want all the podcasts to have the same genre (i.e. “Podcast”) and then have either one song per “album” where the album has the date in the title (preferably in the yyyymmdd format for sort purposes) or one album per artist where the song has the date in the title. That way I can see all the shows from a given podcaster on my Zen Micro in a list and can easily determine the oldest and newest shows. Doppler supports tag overriding for downloaded podcasts – i.e. so I can set them all to have the genre “Podcast”. However, their “smarttags” implementation doesn’t work at all. You’re supposed to use smart tags like %date% and %album% in the tag overrides, if they worked that is. And even the hard coded genre override doesn’t work for WMA files. I assume Doppler is using an MP3 specific library for modifying the metadata tags, rather than the Windows Media libraries that work with both. I assume these will get fixed as the tools get better. In the meantime, I’ve subscribed to the MP3 versions of Ron and Major Nelson’s podcast feeds.

Update: Doppler tag overriding doesn’t seem to work for the hardcoded genre either.

Last weekend, I tried in vain to install a PIE GM9-AUX in my Chevy Blazer. The GM9-AUX converts the CD changer port on the stock CD player that came in the car to a standard RCA jack, which I can plug any one of my four Nomad media players into (though I imaging 99.9% of the time, it will be the Zen Micro) via a standard miniplug to RCA adapter cable. This weekend, my neighbor Dino helped out and we got it installed. He did most of the dashboard removal work and I did the cable installtion and threading it thru the dashboard to somewhere accessable from the driver seat. Thanks Dino!

It’s Thursday, and the Class Designer team is sticking to their new entry every Thursday policy. I don’t want to just post a link to their blog every week, but if they keep doing stuff this cool I’ll have no choice.

Eugene Chigirinskiy could have just posted a screen shot showing tooltips at work in the class designer. But instead, he’s built out an HTML image map on top of said screen shot and set up the areas with titles so that as you hover over areas the screen shot, tooltips pop up the same way they do in the tool. Awesome! I have no idea how long it took him to do this, but that’s dedication!

As he wrote on his blog, Pat Helland’s last day at Microsoft is tomorrow. He’s busily cleaning out his office right now. 😦 He’s starts on Monday @ Amazon to help them implement a service oriented architecture. I heard their CTO was hiring.  Pat’s a big reason why I came to work for Architecture Strategy so I’m really sorry to see him go.

On the plus side, no one will quip “it’s been nice hanging out with you” in the men’s room anymore.

Seriously, Pat’s been through some seriously hard times this past twelve months, and I think the change is a great opportunity for him. I imagine I’ll see him often enough – he’s back on campus next week to present at an architecture forum. Plus, I offered to setup dasBlog on pathelland.com so he’ll keep blogging.