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!

I did say I was going to go a little dark when I took the new job didn’t I? Things have been hectic – my brother’s getting married in just under two weeks and I’m working on getting my part of my new project’s Business Requirements Document (otherwise known as the BRD) done before I leave on vacation. The BRD process is fairly odd for this project – for one, the project team is writing it instead of the business unit. Given that we’re building infrastructure, many of the “business” elements of the BRD are not particularly appropriate. But we’re muddling thru. In a meeting with my boss’s boss’s boss last week, he stressed the need for delivering incremental value. In other words, the need for using an agile process which is cool as far as I’m concerned.

I have a couple of longer posts coming, but here are a few short takes for a Monday morning:

Windows Live Writer

Everyone seems gaga over the new tool, so I downloaded it. Pretty cool. I’m writing this post using it. Typically, I write my posts in FrontPageSharePoint Designer and paste them into the dasBlog web editing interface – I’m pretty particular about the HTML that ends up on my blog. So far, Writer seems up for the job. And I love the Web Layout editing mode. Does have some bugs and missing features. For example, it has spell check, but not background spell check. And as Scott pointed out the category list is totally broken when you have a lot of categories. Writer has an SDK, and one of the examples they suggest building with it is “Tags from tagging services”. I’d like to have a simple text box where I could enter categories as tags, and have it automatically create any categories that aren’t already on my site. I’ve already got a side coding project going, but I’m almost done so maybe I’ll take that up next.

XNA Game Studio

I was researching some Xbox stuff for a customer several months ago and got wind of this plan. I can’t wait to see it running. I recently picked up Frank Luna’sIntro to 3d Game Programming: A Shader Approach based on Dave’s recommendation. I figure most, if not all, the source code will be obsolete in the XNA Framework world, but the concepts are spot on so it’s been a good read.

One aspect of this announcement that I haven’t seen talked about yet is the impact on the mod community. Many games today ship with an SDK – here are examples for Dungeon Siege, Half-Life 2 and Doom 3. Of course, the idea is that modder’s get a popular game and industrial-strength game engine to build on for almost no cost and the game publisher expands the value of their game – any mods require the original game to play. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could mod Halo 3? And combined with Live Anywhere, the possibilities are enormous. I can’t wait to see how this evolves.

New Machine & Vista

For the first time in my nearly 8 year MSFT career, I have a desktop machine. And it’s a nice one – a Dell Precision 690 workstation. 2x dual Xenon CPU, 2x 160GB SCSI Hard Drives, dual link DVI outputs for driving twin widescreen monitors – dual is very big on this machine. Pretty much the only skimpy part of this machine is the RAM – only 2GB. But I’m not running x64 (yet) so that’s not a huge deal (yet).

Of course, such a screaming machine runs the latest Vista build. I’m also running it on my laptop – with Aero Glass even, thanks to this driver. The combo of latest Vista build + latest Office build is pretty sweet.

With new machines and new operating systems, I’ve been spending significant time installing. The Dell box turned out to be a real pain as it only has the SCSI drives which are not standard on the WinXP install disk. I’m dual booting XP/Vista on both machines, but I had to create a custom slipstreamed XP install disk to get my Dell workstation up and running (Vista installed without any extra work). But now I’ve got the baseline install imaged – thanks to BootIt NG which I’ve spoken highly of before – I shouldn’t ever have to do that again.

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.

I got interested in computers when my dad started bringing home a terminal to access his companies mainframe over a 300 baud telecoupled modem. The first terminals were paper-based, then we moved-on-up to a VT100. I got interested in programming because I wanted to be able to build my own game like Adventure or Zork. The rest as they say is history and some 20-25 years later I work for Microsoft. I never actually built an adventure game, but if I still wanted to, apparently Rory is teaching a sesson on Inform which apparently is a language for building Interactive Fiction.

Sounds like Code Camp is going to be a blast. Note to self, bug Rory for his slides.

First it was Halo 2′s online stats, game viewer and RSS feeds. Now, MechAssault 2 introduces the concept of Conquest. While Halo 2′s online gaming experience is awesome, it doesn’t lead anywhere – each game is completely unrelated to the others. But with Conquest, each battle impacts the ownership of planets in the galaxy. Each player joins one of the five houses and then can participate in the galactic war. Planet ownership is based on the results of battles fought there. You can see the current map of the galaxy as well as war updates at any time. (But no RSS feed for the war updates – what’s up with that?)

The only bad thing is that MechAssault 2 doesn’t appear to have any per game stats like Halo 2 has. Wouldn’t that be a great experience – Halo 2′s game viewer and per game stats combined with MechAssault 2′s conquest metagame.