Networking Unavailable in XNA GSE

In a forthcoming column in SD Times, I predicted that one of the first things written using XNA GSE would be a Bittorrent client for the XBox360. Wrong. The current version of XNA does not allow network access.

Hmm...

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New Version of The Dragon Book

Holy smoke, the new version was supposed to have hit the storeshelves 2 days ago. Man, I bet they regret not having had the opportunity to put "the lowest-swinging signifier of programming studliness" on the cover.

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Joel's "Ruby is Risky, But We Rely on a DSL" Flub

Joel Spolsky, one of the ablest commentors on the industry, recently made the mistake of combining advice and self-promotion without realizing that what he was writing combined "do what I say, not what I do," with a flame-baiting slap at non-mainstream languages. He's been hammered in the blogosphere, but the …

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XNA GSE Can Install Side-By-Side with VS2005

Ah. Although you cannot develop with XNA GSE inside a VM (either VMWare or Virtual PC), you can install Visual C# Express side-by-side with Visual Studio 2005. There's a slight weirdness in that VC# Express can only install to \$PROGRAM FILES, while I normally keep my dev tools on a …

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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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XNA Game Studio Express

Microsoft has announced (well, not announced, but Gamasutra just spilled the beans) XNA Game Studio Express,  a free product which will allow independents and studios to write games for the XBox 360. It will actually cost \$99 to be able to deploy your games to the 360.

Oh, hey and …

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TOAD for MySql: Free Must-Have Tool

How did I miss this? The tool TOAD by Quest Software is utterly essential to developers using Oracle (and, I would guess, DB2). It's not quite utterly necessary for SQL Server developers who have access to one of the higher-end Visual Studio SKUs. But... ah hah! ... it is available for …

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Jolt Award: Considering Dynamic Categorization via Tagging

The Jolt Awards are the major industry award for software development tools (compilers, libraries, etc.). One problem we face every year is proper classification of tools. Traditionally, we try to refine / fine tune the previous year's categories (Development Environments; Libraries, Frameworks, and Components; etc.). Problems arise frequently balancing the number …

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Garden Point Ruby.NET: True Compiler Available for Download

"[Wayne Kelly is] pleased to announce the preliminary Beta release of the Gardens Point Ruby.NET compiler. Note: this is not just a Ruby/.NET bridge, nor a Ruby Interpreter implemented on .NET, but a true .NET compiler. The compiler can be used to statically compile a Ruby source file …

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