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Just ordered this book…
GTA IV… The game of the year is now only weeks away from being on the shelves and I simply cannot wait.
There are some rumours that this game will be released for the PC in October but it’s just far to far away to wait.
So I have finally given in and bought an XBOX 360 from Amazon.Co.Uk who are, by the way, doing a deal to knock of £10 if you buy the console with GTA IV… my brother was a bit disgusted with this… he said I probably would have got a better package deal from Game… he was probably right… but what the hey!
Microsoft have just reduced the price of the XBOX 360 substantially to help ensure that it remains the leading next-gen console against the PS3.
So I got an e-mail in from Amazon this evening saying that the console had shipped already and will be at my front door hopefully within the next few days… cool… I have a few older games to play on it in the meantime…
Am also happy enough with this purchase because, as a .NET developer, I’ve also been messing with Microsoft Game Studio Express 2.0 so I should be able to use my XBOX 360 for program testing. This is really cool, it makes use out of my pre-existing programming skills, and knowledge of Microsoft development studio, and allows me to cross-develop games that will run flawlessly on the PC and the XBOX. With the next release of Game Studio Express 3.0 there will also be the ability to port games directly to the Zune and hopefully Windows Mobile as well…
As well as that I should be able to stream media pretty easily on my home network from my Vista machine down to my XBOX so that’s cool too…
As well as that I’m gonna sign up for XBOX live which should integrate nicely into my Windows Live account so I get joined up E-Mail, Instant Messaging etc etc.
This is the thing I love the most about Microsoft technologies… they all just glue together seamlessly!
Anyway, in the meantime – new toys! Woo-Hoo!
Just need to get myself a decent HD TV now to connect my XBOX to. Still can’t justify this seeing as I have two perfectly good TVs already that are only about five years old and still working perfectly… I need to start leaving cups of coffee on top of them or something to help me build my business case for new asset investment…
Microsoft Surface was first announced a few years ago, and there’s been lots more talk about this year as it has become more productised.
If you haven’t heard about Microsoft Surface, then click the following link for an intro:
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/
Think this is really cool and would love to see it transferred to next-generation laptop/desktop screens…
Surface is going to be cool and seems to be drawing an increasing amount of attention… but what about the developer side of this…??? It looks like Microsoft Silverlight, Expression Blend, WPF and XAML are going to play a big part in the application development of all this… have been looking at all of these more and more and self-teaching… Microsoft Silverlight 2 is due out pretty soon which will include .NET Framework coding support and usher in the next generation of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) in direct competition to Adobe Air and open-source Adobe Flex 3 which Adobe just released yesterday morning… .NET coders are going to love Silverlight because it builds upon their existing skills and toolsets and really does allow designers and developers to work separately but together, and for the first time their code will work in any mainstream browser on any mainstream operating system!
Scott Guthrie posted a really good intro to Silverlight 2 earlier in the week… click here…
There’s some more up-to-date videos of this from CES 2008 in Las Vegas…
This one’s just a generic demo…
