Michael Swanson has written a cool article on how they use an Ambient Orb, a cool “glowing ball“ device that can change colors on command, as their “build flag” during Continuous Integration.  Check it out!

It's easy.  First, download one of the just-released beta versions of our new Express development tools.  For smart client development, take your pick of C#, VB, C++, or J#.  If you want to build web pages instead of smart clients, download the Web Dev version, which allows you to build web pages in VB, C#, or J#.  And, finally, for you database people, there's SQL Server Express edition.

Next, visit Channel9's “Summer of Express” coding contest page, read the contest rules, write your killer app, submit it, and wait for the judges to shower praise on you!  It's that easy!

P.S. -- All you C++ developers that have switched to C#: Check out the 2005 version of C++/CLI.  You just might fall in love with writing C++ again!

Yesterday, a bunch of evangelists and developers from the Longhorn groups hunkered down in an offsite location and tackled a WinFS/Avalon project under the guidance of Karsten Januszewski.  The end result was some fascinating insights (at least for me) into the things we are and are not getting right with Longhorn (the good news is that was precisely the objective ).  We worked in a “pair programming“ style, and I had the great fortune of working with Krzysztof Cwalina (one of the creators of the FxCop utility)

We started off using the WinHEC build of Longhorn, then shoehorned a release of Visual Studio 2005 and the Longhorn SDK onto the machines.  From there, we started digging into how to use WinFS as a datastore for music media files, plus basically writing a miniature “Windows Media Player” that let you set up various playlist styles.

What I learned yesterday:

• WinFS still needs work.  Many parts of the object model seem to violate the “Principle of Least Surprise,” and I think there was overall concensus that we need to sharpen up the schema models and the mechanism to access them.  WinFS will be an extremely powerful file system, but we still need to work out a few kinks.  For those of you already experimenting with WinFS -- we definitely felt your pain yesterday   That's part of the reason we do these little “coding day“ events.
• The Longhorn SDK has some really cool examples in it, but still needs work.  I found that the doc browser crashed quite easily during searches, and many samples didn't cross-reference to other areas.  On the brighter side, we were able to do all our tasks just using the docs from the Longhorn SDK.
• Working with Avalon was an interesting treat.  It definitely needs a designer to eliminate the pain of hand-carving XML tags, but overall it was a blast to do!  There's no doubt that Avalon+XAML can make some extremely compelling (and easy-to-build) applications.
• Krzysztof wasn't satisfied with just doing Avalon stuff... he decided we needed to dig into the details of Avalon3D and create a new type of music visualizer.  You can find some cool info on Avalon3D here and here.  What we managed to get running was a simple box that moved at random directions and speeds.  We didn't get the time to sample the music to have it move to the rhythm, but that's pretty simple to add.  Overall, the Avalon3D stuff worked pretty nicely (even though the rendering on my machine sucked due to not having drivers that were integrated with the Longhorn build I was using).

While we're on this subject, I'm sure it will come up eventually: DirectX and Avalon3D are NOT the same thing.  There are many major differences (for instance, Avalon 3D uses a right-handed coordinate system, whereas DirectX uses a left-handed one), and they each have well-defined roles and APIs.  I think it will be interesting to see how people decide to mix the two during the Longhorn timeframe (I'll be one of those people .  They each have a purpose, they both work together, but one doesn't replace the other (go read this slide deck from Joe Beda to see more details). Look on the MSDN site for source examples of Avalon 3D in the near future, and in the not too near future, I hope to post a few examples myself of some DirectX and Avalon integrated applications/games.

Sometime during this summer (probably before August), we will release our second SDK update to DirectX 9.0, called "Microsoft DirectX 9.0 SDK Update (Summer 2004).”  If you attended the Game Developer's Conference in March, you've already heard all this, but for those of you who haven't, I have some news to share with you Managed DirectX die-hards.
 

Let's do the bad news part first:

1) The Visual Basic examples are gone.  I'm sure this will cause some hurt feelings among VB developers, but I intend to publish a simple C# to VB conversion guide that reflects the lessons I learned while converting my DX gaming book from C# to VB.  The amount of work you will need to do isn't that bad, and hopefully the VB versions will return in a future release, should there be sufficient demand.  Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft does not have infinite resources for software development, and I can attest to the fact that the loss of the VB samples have caused great concern among many people, even internally.  On the other hand, cutting the VB samples gave the Managed DirectX team a little more time to build several high-quality examples in Managed code using C# and to add more improvements to the API and the documentation.  In my opinion, the end results are worth the loss of the VB samples -- even die-hard VB people that work with DirectX should be pleased.

2) There is no longer a DirectX "Wizard" in Visual Studio.  See below for my comments on the replacement for the DirectX VS Wizard.

3) Some examples have been removed (Dolphin, Point Sprites, etc.).  I hope these make it back in the final 2004 release.  In my opinion, there's no such thing as "Too many DirectX examples"

Now for the good news:  As I've hinted, there are many improvements in the API and documentation (which has been the biggest complaint that I've seen about the Managed DirectX libraries).  There are some noteworthy demos though that will simply blow your socks off:

1) A new "Empty Project" from which you can base new MDX applications.  From my perspective, this is better than the old VS wizard, for two reasons: 1) The benefits of the autogenerated code were, in my opinion, marginal, and 2) The new release contains an installable "Empty Project" which has a better code layout than the DirectX Wizard in the 2003 update.  For instance, it has a more direct message handling interface than the mysterious "Application.DoEvents()" method call.  In a nutshell, the new C# project files map more closely to a "look and feel" C++ DX example, without making it feel like rehashed C++. 

2) The source for the Mesh Viewer (mview.exe) tool has finally been released.  Even though it's in C++, it's still a long-overdue addition.

3) A demo of how C# can be used as a safe scripting language inside unmanaged games.  This one is great!

4) Several HLSL samples.  If you aren't familiar with HLSL or shader programming, this release will cure that problem.

5) The biggie: Windows Form-like UI Elements (see photo below).  This is a huge deal.  Many game developers must resort to writing their own UI when they write games.  This is a repetitive (and often painful) process.  The DirectX team has dramatically simplified this to give us the ability to write Winform-type components (drop downs, checkboxes, etc.) with ease.  The downside is that you don't have a visual designer to help you create the layouts, but that's a minor setback.  Overall, I just can't rave about this one enough!!

Overall, this is a great release (even in its current beta form) and bodes very well for developers that want to continue writing managed code.

 Well, due to my immense popularity in the blogging community, Google offered me a GMail account (ok, ok, I begged a friend who knew a friend who worked at Google J).

There are several things that struck me about the GMail interface that were pleasant.  Of note are the keyboard shortcuts that make working with email a “clickless” event (and for those of you that used/use “vi”, you’ll find the commands quite intuitiveJ).  There are other nice touches that make Gmail a pleasure to work with.  Even the “advertising area” is unobtrusive.  Speaking of which, I tried to deliberately bait Gmail by sending a message to my account with words in sentences that would trigger the advertising banners (Iraq, Digital Cameras, “Send flowers”, Viagara).  It didn’t bite on them.  I’m guessing they don’t have that part turned on yet, but I’m also guessing that it might create a unique “Google challenge” – people writing notes to each other to see what kind of ads they can trigger on the side.

And, of course, there’s the privacy issue.  Personally, I’m not worried about it.  Google offers GMail with very clear terms and conditions, and has so far proven to be a trustworthy source.  Not in the sense of a “Better Business Bureau” kind of seal, I mean the kind of trust you have with the US Post Office (or whatever federal postal system is in your country).  The point is the Google has a strong enough ethics policy and up-front set of published privacy standards that I regard them as a trustworthy place to store my email.  When you think about it, we engage in many similar exchanges on a day-to-day basis, where we put varying levels of trust in people, sometimes even with complete strangers (giving your credit card to a waiter, for instance.  Although that can be regarded as a “trust by proxy”, since that person represents the business establishment that you are dining in).  I don’t trust Google because I know how “secure” their computers are, or how many digital certificates they have.  I trust Google because of prior experience with them and having a relatively decent understanding of their leadership’s moral value system. The point is that trust is ultimately a human condition.  Part of me would like to believe that when Microsoft bloggers, like me, put a human face on this multi-billion dollar corporation, we are doing things that help address the “human condition” of trust in Microsoft.  Hopefully, you feel the same way too J

 Seems like “a reader from Boston” hated my book, and game me the honor of nailing me with a two star review on Amazon (why not 1 or 0?):

“Almost as Bad as "DirectX Game Engine Design with C#" !!!

Sorry, but I would steer clear of this publisher (Apres). They now have allowed to badly editted books out the door. There are a few nuggets of interesting information here, but this book is certainly not for the beginner. Poor examples, Poor code explanations. Just an overall confusing book. When will we get a good C# game programming book. If you are looking for a good beginners game programming book look at Sams publishing's "Learn Game Programming in 24 hours". I wish that author would write a C# edition!”

I’ve read “Teach Yourself Game Programming in 24 Hours.” (which is what the person is actually referring to).  It’s not bad, but after get through all 450+ pages, you don’t learn a thing about 3D gaming, which I fundamentally believe needs to be covered even in a beginner’s book.  It’s also ironic that they say the examples and explanations are poor – I really tried to make explanations and examples clear, especially in the later chapters where I felt people could get more-easily confused.

I don’t mind getting bad reviews, but it’s frustrating when there’s a lack of specifics.  Writing a technical book is hard, and I can’t make future books better unless I have good feedback.  If you’ve bought my book, please feel free to send me feedback (or post it on Amazon).  Reader comments are the best way for me to deliver a better product!

P.S. If you’ve bought my book – thank you!  My motherboard blew up this weekend and my net profits of $75 from the book went to buying a new motherboard J

 I’ve made a few changes to the source for Chapter 3.  You can pick them up here.  I will post the source to the Apress website once I have all the chapters updated.  The changes are relatively minor – some UI changes, plus a fix to the calls to dispose for the full screen test.

Found an eloquent post by Orson Scott Card on his website.  Regardless of your opinion, you should give it a read.

In other news, Whitehouse.org delivers their proposed wording for the constitutional amendment to George Bush, plus provides all you “Ban Gay Marriage” people a great poster to put in your house, car, or over all the doors and windows of a local gay bar.

ok, I'll stop now.

Really.

I promise.

Robert recently blogged an opinion about the Gay Marriage amendment proposal.  Ol' GW found a nice lightning rod with that one.  I'm somewhat ambivalent about the actual subject.  The problem is the dual nature of marriage (at least in the US).  On one hand, it's an affirmation of a bond between two people (traditionally between a man and woman), on the other hand, it's an important legal document that gives the two people rights and privileges that are denied to others in other types of arrangements (i.e., incorporation, partnerships, civil unions, etc.).  But it's not the issue of Gay Marriage that has me so damned mad that I think really bad thoughts about the president.  Here's my opinion plain and simple:

Keep your fucking hands off the Constutution.

I can't think of any better way to put it.  The Constitution isn't something you casually change for some “biblical moral imperative“ (witness Article 18).  But I suppose President's motto is, “If we can't pass laws, we'll add amendments to the constitution.“  C'mon guys.  You call yourselves conservatives? 

Amendments to the Constitution are perfectly acceptable if they happen withing the context of what the Constitution was for: “..to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity..”  I'm utterly unconvinced that an attempt to apply religiously-based dogma into the Constitution is either wise or necessary, nor does the proposed amendment do a damn thing for promoting the general welfare.  And let's not forget the last time we proposed an amendment (prior to Article 18) that was backed up by verse upon verse in the bible:

No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.

Did you forget about that one?  It was proposed in 1861 in order to guarantee a state's right to have legal slavery, and frankly, had it been proposed sooner (early 1800's for instance), it probably would have passed because slavery was a “God given institution” to the states that permitted it (ok, that's kind of stretching it, since states that did/didn't permit slavery was about 50/50 in the US in the early 1800's, if I remember my history correctly.  If not, just remember I'm a computer scientist, not a historian).

Anyway, regardless of your moral convictions about the whole “gay marriage” issue, you should think really, really hard before stapling something like that to the Constitution.  It's not something to be taken lightly, and believe me, the gay marriage issue falls FAR below the threshold for something that merits a change to the Constitution (take the test.  Put down the bible and justify banning gay marriage without referring to words like “values“, “tradition“, or “institution“).  Even more disturbing is that it is the first amendment, since the one I mentioned above, that has the sole purpose of _denying_ civil rights to a group of U.S. citizens (ok, I may be wrong there again...I'm sure a historian will correct me if I am).

OK, I'm going to get off my soapbox now.  Somebody else can get on and rant at will.

P.S. -- If you want to respond to my post in a civil manner, feel free to post in the comments section.  I reserve the right to delete any whiny-assed comments that I think are rude, vulgar, or off-topic.  Don't like those rules?  Start your own blog and say whatever you please.

Well, it was a good fight, but the press is reporting that Wesley Clark is going to announce the end of his run for the White House.  Frankly, I'm quite thankful that our other veteran, John Kerry, is in the lead.  This makes the blow of Clark bowing out a little easier.  Now all we have to do is prosecute people that went AWOL and I can rest a little easier.

One warning for Senator Kerry as he continues his campaign:  If you're a Democrat president and screw one person in the White House, you will get impeached.  If you're a Republican, it's ok if you fuck the entire country, as long as you don't do it in the White House.

There are not many math books out there that can be both funny and highly informative, but the latest book from Fletcher Dunn (of BloodRayne fame) and Ian Parberry, “3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development” does a pretty darn good job (it’s not too often you can laugh about dead sheep!).  Most of the funny stuff is early in the book, but the authors do a great job of getting right into the meat of the basics, without insulting your intelligence.  They go over a lot of the essential fundamentals, including the standard stuff on matrices, angular calculations, and collision detection.  Although much less detailed than many of the higher-end advanced graphics books, beginning and intermediate game/graphics programmers will find this book indispensable for their desktop.

(This post failed to get reflected from my MSDN blog yesterday, so I'm manually posting it today.  blah!)

In case you havne't seen it yet.  Looks like the virus spreaders are doing their best to wreck your computer, and now they want to do it through ZIP files. 

Microsoft Consumer Virus Alert:

Why We Are Issuing This Alert

W32/Mydoom@MM spreads through e-mail. This worm can disguise the sender's address, a tactic known as spoofing, and may generate e-mails that appear to have been sent by Microsoft. Many of the addresses Mydoom uses are valid addresses that are being spoofed for malicious purposes.

Mydoom Virus Alert: What to Do

Treat all e-mail attachments with caution, particularly .zip files in the case of this virus, even if they appear to be from a trusted source. Learn what to do about virus infections. http://www.microsoft.com/security/antivirus/mydoom.asp

Complete Information: http://www.microsoft.com/security/antivirus/mydoom.asp

Well, I turned in the last chapter on my book last night, talk about a relief!  Now I can finally do things I've been ignoring for the last few months...updating my blog more often, paying bills, feeding my dogs :)

I'll be posting some additional news here later today or tomorrow about my new job at Microsoft.  Stay tuned!

And the obligatory cool link:  The CLR Performance and Diagnostics page -- everything you always wanted to know about making your .NET apps get up and dance! http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/using/understand/perf/default.aspx

Well, you've probably heard by now that theserverside.com has a new sister site, theserverside.net.  The new site is a great community site focused on enterprise-based .NET development.  It's headed up by my buddy and all around Java/.NET geek, Ted Neward.  Check it out, but, um, give them a couple of days to work out the user registration bugs...right now things don't seem to be working very smoothly in that area.  Other than that though, it looks really nice!

Speaking of new sites... I've used Yahoo as my home since 1996 or so, but this latest release of MSN has convinced me to switch over... the drag-and-drop web parts is really cool, and I like the email interface more.

ok, back to my book...I hope to be finished this weekend (crossing fingers!)

Many Microsoft bloggers write small entries on their aniversary dates to reflect on their time at Microsoft.  Rather than doing that, I had decided to write one on my 500th day, which seemed like an interesting time to pause and reflect. Quite serendipitously, my 500th day at Microsoft landed on Jan 1st, 2004.  Of course, it's Jan 3rd right now, but I've been up to my elbows in book writing, and took some time off yesterday to enjoy the large volumes of snow the Puget Sound area has been enjoying this last week -- and promptly managed to injure my back on the slopes, so now I have plenty of time to reflect while a heating pad nurses my back .

Many of you know I'm an evangelist at Microsoft, but what most of you don't know right now is that I don't evangelize at the moment.  Instead, I'm the “bad news messenger” making sure customers and developers understand our overall situation with regards to the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine and how you can transition away from it.  Many people, in fact, are stunned to find that I'll even gladly talk to them about migrating their Java applications to Sun's JVM.  Why do I do that?  Because from the highest executive level down to me, we know need to do the right thing for the customer, and sometimes the right answer is helping the customer move to another JVM (there's limits on how much we can help because our support people aren't experts in Sun's current version of Java, nor can we fix things inside their JVM, but we will do the best we can to help).  Of course, we'd love to see people move to .NET, and we will continue to work hard to make sure that we offer the best  tools to help you migrate your applications to it.

I am looking forward to returning to evangelism in the true sense of the word this year.  Vic Gundotra, one of the GM's in my organization, points out that evangelists have six key responsibilities:

• They help developers understand the value proposition of our tools and platform
• They network with ISVs and key customers
• They create communities that are excited about our technologies
• They build prototypes to help partners and developers cut through the marketing hype and understand the true value of our approach (yes, that means Microsoft evangelists work hard to “pull back the curtains“ on the stuff that Microsoft marketing people sometimes try to cover ). 
• They listen to the needs of customers and developers to understand the correct evangelism strategy, and build a plan around it (rather than having each evangelist “go cowboy“, so to speak)
• And most importantly: Have fun. 

Personally, I don't think we've done a good job of creating an organized Java strategy.  Many Java developers don't know, for instance, that we have a comprehensive pattern repository, refactoring coming in our next version of Visual Studio, or detailed articles on how to migrate  technologies  from  Java  to  .NET, or that we have a complete guide on interoperability with J2EE and .NET.

So, my “new year's resolution” is to fix this.  I promise every Java developer that wants to migrate to .NET (or is being forced to) that I will do everything I can to help make the road easier in 2004.  As one who was a hard-core Microsoft-hating J2EE developer over 2 years ago, I remember the frustration I had trying to learn .NET, and it was because I was trying VERY hard to shoehorn my Java thinking into .NET (with little success).  That frustration is still fresh in my mind (although my J2EE knowledge is now getting more and more rusty).  I will list the steps I intend to take next week here, but I would love to hear suggestions from any of you on how we can make the road smoother for Java developers (besides the old, “Why don't you just adopt J2EE and be done with it?” question )

Thanks for reading my ramblings!

For those of you that didn't know, Ward Cunningham has joined Microsoft.  I consider Ward one of my foremonst mentors, and he's an all-around fascinating guy to hang out with.  Aside from creating the Wiki concept and being the wellspring of what we call “Extreme Programming”, what makes Ward so wonderful is his incredibly simple view of the world.  He seems to have a keen sense of “just right” when it comes to tackling problems, and I think that shows in all the past work he's done.

I'm definitely looking forward to what he can contribute to our developer community, and more importantly, to the software development community in general.  Watch for his work in Microsoft's Patterns and Practices area.

Most of you know I'm writing a book on .NET game programming.  It has some GDI+ programming and a lot of Managed DirectX programming.  If you want to buy only one book to help you with Managed DirectX, my book is not it.

Huh?

You heard me right.  If you are only going to buy one book, I recommend you buy Tom Miller's excellent “Managed DirectX 9 Kick Start: Graphics and Game Programming”.  Tom was the brains behind the Managed DirectX code anyway, so this is a nice gem that's straight from the source!  What I really like about it is that it nicely covers all the details in an introductory way.  Some chapters left me wanting more details, but I think it does a great job of hitting on all the cool essentials you should know about Managed DirectX.

Oh, if you have the money to buy two books on Managed DirectX, _then_ I recommend mine as the second

Ok, time to confess:  I hate the Command Prompt that Microsoft gives you.  Ok, "hate" is too strong of a word, but as an old Unix guy (ok, not THAT old -- my first time I write C code on a Unix system was in 1982), I miss all the conveniences I had with the Unix shells and their utilities.  Of course, there's several ways to get around that, but none are quite as interesting as Microsoft's own "Services for Unix".  What's really cool about it is that you have a complete Unix environment running on top of the Windows kernel.  It's not a funky "interpreter", but the real thing (ah, the delight of setting up "cron" jobs). 

Even better:  Right now, it's free (well, the 3.5 beta is)

Even more better: You can find a ton of extra software for it at the Interop Systems Tools site.

Go have fun!

(Post edited in deference to a comment from a reader)

I don't think it sucked as much as critics said it did.  In fact, I liked it more than the 2nd movie. 

*spoiler alert*

Trinity dies.  So does Neo.

I was doing a little book research on Sprites in DirectX when I came across Kevin Harris' CodeSampler.com website.  He has a TON of samples in C++ there, the DirectX 9 samples being located here.  On that page, you will find a sample titled "Creating 2D Sprites with D3DXSprite"  It's one of those simple DX samples that gets right to the point, but still gives you something "meaty" to tinker with (as are most of his samples).  Anyway, the challenge is that none of his samples use Managed DirectX.  I took a few hours last night (plus 30 minutes today to have Tom Miller correct my errors ) to rewrite the app in Managed DirectX and C#.  You can get the code here (csd3dxsprite.zip (44.07 KB) all set up for VS 2003).  There's a few points to keep in mind:

• The code was rewritten to heavily leverage the event model in .NET windows forms.  Overall, it should be very understandable, but you can clearly see the difference between the C++ and C# version in this area.
• The code is about 1/3 smaller than the C++ version.
• The code is not an example of stellar "defensive programming".  I just wanted to do a fast conversion.  Feel free to criticize, fix it, make it prettier, etc. 
• Finally, those of you familiar with DX will notice two things:
  • The "main loop" lingers inside the OnPaint event, triggering a "this.Invalidate()" at the end, effectively forcing OnPaint to be raised again.  Tom Miller claims that this is a more effective mechanism to work inside the eventing model but still follow the basics of a "game loop".  He wrote the Managed DirectX code, so who am I to argue?
  • The code uses the new DX9 Sprite class, which is unrelated to DirectDraw sprites (they are basically textured quads).

Anyway...enjoy!

In case you're missing out on the big events at PDC, don't worry!  Most of the presentations can be found here.  Keep an eye out for webcasts and extra things coming over the next couple of weeks.  There's a LOT of stuff coming from Microsoft now regarding our next revision of our developer tools and languages (Whidbey), our next gen database (Yukon), and our next major platform (Longhorn and the supporting API, WinFx).

As a guy who used to do a lot of Ada programming, I've always missed the "generics" that were found in that language.  One really cool thing is that the next version of C# will incorporate a strongly-typed generic mechanism.  While not as complex as Ada generics (thankfully!), it will definitely lead up to some higher-performance applications.  The nice thing about generics in C# is that they provide stronger type binding, eliminating (or reducing) the need for Object casting and boxing/unboxing, which is an expensive operation during execution.

Ironically, this is almost the opposite effect that you will get in Java generics (coming in the 1.5 release), which appears to force boxing in many cases when using generics (in fact, I heard one Sun person at JavaOne mention that boxing was introduced specifically to "make generics work right").  This potentially means the performance gap between Java and C# virtual machines will get wider.  Only time will tell, but I've clearly made my bets.  Of course, the big advantage of Java still remains: You can make an application run slowly and not take advantage of the underlying platform anywhere at anytime 

P.S. -- Peter Drayton is back!  Let's hope it's for good this time!  I always enjoyed reading his blog.  Much easier than walking down two flights of stairs to just talk to him

I had the chance to read both Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right" as well as Michael Moore's "Dude, Where's My Country?"  as I was winging back from NY to Seattle.  I enjoyed them both, but found Al's book more enjoyable.  I have always enjoyed Michael's biting attacks on Corporate America and our Government, but felt he was trying too hard in this book to state the obvious: That the people running our country right now are lying to us on multiple levels, EXCEPT about who they have sex with.  Of course, you can disagree with me (that's what the comments section is for), and I don't mind.  Hell, sometimes I find myself disagreeing with myself   And I must admit that I don't agree with everything Michael says (he sometimes seems overly eager to stretch facts to make a point)... but you have to admire his principles.  Most folks, for instance, are only familiar with his controversial acceptance speech at the 75th Academy Awards, but I would encourage you to watch his Red Carpet Q&A session (click on "Documentary Feature") that was done immediately after his award.  It's quite interesting (even if you disagree with his viewpoints).

OK, enough politics, this is also supposed to be a little technical.  For those of you wanting to learn more about Managed DirectX, I would encourage you to look at Craig Andera's tutorials on the managed (.NET) verison of Direct3D.  If you want to get a quick overview of some the features of Managed DirectX and why you might want to consider using it, have a peek at this slide deck, primarily written by Tom Miller, Managed DirectX - IGDA.ppt (1.16 MB).  And for those of you wanting to see a simple deck on what it takes to be a Game Programmer, check this one out: Game Development.ppt (73 KB) (It needs some updating, but I need to finish my book first).

Oh, stay tuned for really cool posts this coming week on all sorts of new technologies coming from Microsoft.  PDC kicks off tomorrow and we will FINALLY be able to start talking about some of the new innovation we've been working on over the last few years!

Well, I'm heading to NYC for a one week trip to explain the New and Improved MSJVM Gospel.  If you see a disheveled, 6'1 guy in a rumpled suit and a war-torn look on his face: that's me (come to think of it, that could be any guy in the financial section of Manhattan at 4pm).  Speaking of the MSJVM, I gotta give credit to Sun, they're doing a pretty decent job of trying to help people move from the MSJVM to the Sun JRE.  They even have an "upgrade site" aimed at helping people move from the MSJVM to the Sun JRE.  Of course, many of the remaining MSJVM-dependent applications use Microsoft-specific libraries, which won't run inside Sun's (or BEA's, or IBM's) JRE.  Sun is promising an upgrade tool that will detect (but apparently not automatically correct) dependencies on Microsoft-specific libraries.  Microsoft already has a tool that will convert many of the dependencies, the Java Language Conversion Assistant (JLCA).  Of course, die-hard Java advocates will point out that the JLCA only converts to C#, but if you're already wanting to take advantage of Microsoft-specific libraries, and you want to avoid the performance and development problems of Swing, the JLCA is the best way to go.

Doug Purdy introduced me to The Gospel of Supply-Side Jesus.  I'm looking forward to reading Al Franken's book on the flight to NY.  I should be writing my own book, but it's tough to write a book when you're packed into the middle seat in the coach section.  Speaking of my book, the Amazon link to it is now down.  I think they put it up too early (and considering the delays I'm having because of work-related trips like this to NYC, maybe that was the right thing to do :-( ).  For a while, I've been worried that I've been so buried in my book writing that I would miss out on some major, incredible peice of news.  Then I heard that the Cubs really were NOT going to to the world series, so I guess everything is normal.

Time to sign off, I gotta go buy a vacuum cleaner.  The one I have sucks.  Well, technically, that's what it's NOT doing

Amazon has finally listed my book, Beginning .NET Game Programming in C#.  Of course, they have just about everything except the ISBN and author names wrong :)  In any case, I'm really excited about getting this thing done!

Oh, Kill Bill rocked.  I wish it hadn't been split in two though.

CNET is reporting the Jan 2, 2004 deadline for the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine has been extended to Sept 30, 2004.  That should give everybody plenty of time to migrate to .NET now

What fun.  Time for everybody to change their web pages if you use Applets or ActiveX controls.  More details here.