XNA GSE Won't Render Games Under VMWare

Oh, bummer! Given that XNA GSE is a beta and given that it requires C# Express, not Visual Studio, I installed it in a VMWare OS, but when I went to run the sample SpaceWar game, I received a "No suitable graphics" message. I think that leaves me out of …

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Meet the new boss...

Nope, not a clever job-related post. I've been listening to my "5-star" songs on Windows Media Player and, y'know, is there any better minute of rock than the end of "Won't Get Fooled Again"? (Tell it to the hand, Zeppelin fans.)

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XNA Game Studio Express Available

I'm kicking myself for having two weeks ago written a column on Microsoft's outreach to non-professional programmers. If I had waited until my current deadline, I would have an excuse to spend the day programming a game for the XBox. As it is, I have GSA sitting in my /Downloads …

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Concurrent Programming in C# Intro

DevX has published my introductory article on concurrent programming in C# (a companion piece to my earlier article on C++/CLI and OpenMP). The interesting thing is that OpenMP makes parallel constructs easier to express in C++ than is possible in C#. On the other hand, C#'s memory management …

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Intel Releases New Threading Tools

I had a preview last week of Intel's new threading products, including "Threading Building Blocks," a C++ runtime library (template-based) that provides high-performance thread-safe data structures. I was very impressed by the slides showing performance:

I look forward to trying out the tools myself.

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(Thin) Book Or Article To Convince CEO Of Agility in Develoment?

I'm ashamed I don't have an answer for this: a client is a CEO who finds himself, after a successful career in the domain, in charge of a company developing software in that domain. Naturally, he is more familiar with traditional project management and when he thinks about what worked …

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8 Planets? 12 Planets? Slow News Day

So now they're saying that Pluto is going to be demoted. A week ago they were saying that Cedna, etc., were going to be promoted. Is anything official yet? Or have things gotten to the point where even science news is the subject of 24-hour cable news speculation? What does …

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Thinking Parallel Blog

I just discovered Michael Sļ's blog on parallel programming. He comments pro and con about my DevX article.

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Article on Using OpenMP with C++/CLI

My latest article on DevX shows how easy it is (in the best case) to use OpenMP with C++/CLI. OpenMP is a low-level library to help create concurrent operations. One of things I talk about in the article is that it is at the finest-grain (loops) and the coarsest-grain …

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Fabian's HDR Photography

My friend Fabian Gonzalez is producing some great images with high dynamic range (HDR) photography:

This is a technique that attempts to reproduce the incredible range of light-to-dark that our vision system integrates. After taking 3 photos (over-, under-, and correctly- exposed) of the same subject (in this case, managing …

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