Managed World

I honestly don't know how I missed this piece of news. I didn't even want to share the news as I wanted to keep it all to myself :).

Have you been messing around with XNA? If so, do you want to see your game on XBox Live Arcade? I know: who wouldn't. But you never know :P. If you would love to see this, there's an upcoming contest just for you: http://www.dreambuildplay.com/index.html. The prize that is currently hinted at is that the winner's game will be posted to XBox Live Arcade for everyone all XBox users to download and play.

Now that's just wicked cool!

It's interesting to see how different the culture is in certain ways here in Amsterdam. For instance, the difference that everyone talks about: marijuana. There were several times where I was sitting in the hotel lobby waiting for someone and I smelt an overwhelming smell of smoke, and NOT cigarette smoke. Not only that, but you find Bongs, Hookahs (sp?), and various other drug parafenalia at the local corner store.

The impression I get though is that Europeans (at least those here in Holland (the small sample that I hung around with)) tend to have a great sense of culture. There is definitely a sense of community and history that you get over here (that I haven't gotten in the States).

I know this is going to be a gross generalization, but it always feels like in the States you are surrounded by people driving their SUVs to work without a care about anyone around them, working all day, and then heading home and not investing back into the community in any way. I know I'm certainly guilty of this type of life myself. But why? Why am I a hermit? That's something I want to think more about while I'm away on this trip.

One other thing, the public transit system here ROCKS. Other than the charter bus I took to the venue a couple of days, I took the train everywhere I went. And it never failed, I was always within three stops on a single train when I did go there. And it's so efficient. Everytime I tried to catch was either on time, or one to two minutes early. I can't imagine this is the way it always is, but it certainly was when I tried to take the train.

Seeing how much traffic sucked when I did take the charter bus here, it's no wonder why bikes and public transit are so popular here. And with how many people I saw riding their bikes or walking, it's no wonder why there were so many people that were not obese.

What a great country. It's so great to get a different perspective on life every once in a while.

Next up: Singapore.

Well, my trip to Amsterdam is almost over. I was here in Amsterdam to do some training of trainers for an upcoming Longhorn Server event that we (DPE @ Microsoft) will be launching world-wide in the coming months.

I knew there were going to be some "big" types of names here, but I don't think I fully understood what that meant :P. There were several MS Regional Directors at the events, countless MS MVPs, and other highly-respected trainers from all over the globe (about 32 people in total). I'm also proud to say that I finally get to meet Christian Weyer in person (and have a beer (or two (or three (or four))) with him). What a fun gun. And he's just as smart as he seems online. It was a blast chatting about TxF with him on several occasions.

Considering it was the first "major event" I talked at, I thought it went decently well. I tag-teamed with Keith Brown from Pluralsight (another pleasure, that's for sure). I gave four talks in total: High Performance Computing and Compute Cluster Server 2003, Windows Virtualization Roadmap (including Windows Server Virtualization), Transactional NTFS (my favorite, but I'm a little biased), and Terminal Services in Longhorn Server.

I definitely don't know enough about HPC. While I was able to answer some questions, I have a very high-level knowledge of HPC so I wasn't able to answer most of the in-depth questions. Windows Virtualization Roadmap went well. I just love this stuff. I love talking about Ring Compression and the new Virtualization hardware assists that are coming (and the like). I'm hoping to work up some demos before I present this again in Singapore next week. Perhaps some two demos using PowerShell: one using CmdLets to add new virtual machines into Virtual Server, and the other one about building a PS provider that allows you to browse Virtual Server -> Virtual Machine -> Virtual Properties by "dir" and "cd" and the like :).

The Transactional NTFS talk went well, but that was the talk I was least concerned about. Since I have been living in TxF land for a bit now, I'm comfortable talking about all the issues for it. In the future, I want to make some demos that are more sexy for TxF. I'm also thinking about possibly coming up with a demo scenario I can use to help tell the TxF Story. The funny part is that I realized I'm missing some slides. I realize this because there were several questions that came up from the audience that would have been addressed directly by some of the slides I had removed. Oops :).

Last was the Terminal Services in Longhorn Server talk. Ouch! This talk is nowhere near technical enough, nor developer-oriented enough. It's my own fault though since I "put together" the deck for the Touchdown program. I'm hoping to get a team member back in Redmond to mail the latest LHS build to me in Singapore so I can setup a Virtual Machine in order to write up some demos and show off features like TS-Remote Programs. We'll see how that situation works out.

That's about it. I managed to take some pictures while I was here, so I will try to put them up when I get back to Seattle (or if I can find time while I'm in Singapore).

Hello everyone, and welcome back to  the “Feature Of The Week” newsletter. This week, we will revisit a prior Fear Of The Week technology that we discussed in order to show off a cool capability of that technology. If you are a developer wanting to mess around with TxF (Transactional NTFS), you should especially read on :).

Did You Know? Did you know that on Vista, Transactional NTFS will work with an NTFS-formatted USB Flash Drive? It’s true! If you want to play around with Transactional NTFS and how it can interact with SQL, for instance, but you only have one hard drive, you don’t have to worry about Secondary Resource Managers and all that hubbub, gizmos,  doodads, and what-cha-ma-call-its. Just pop in that NTFS-formatted USB Flash Drive, and play around until your heart’s content.

Since the USB Flash Drive is not the system drive (well, we hope it’s not the system drive in this case :P), you can circumvent the need for secondary Resource Managers when wanting to test out interoperability scenarios with Transactional NTFS (like TxF + WCF, TxF + SQL, TxF + MSMQ, etc.).

Happy Coding :).

Generic Transactional NTFS Links...

Documentation

• Windows SDK

Videos/Webcasts

• [Video] Vista Transactional File System
• [Webcast] The Revolutionary Vista TxF Infrastructure
• [Webcast] Developing Apps For Vista With TxF

Blogs

• Jim Johnson
• Jason Olson

Hello everyone, and welcome back to  the “Feature Of The Week” newsletter. This week’s newsletter will be short and sweet. We will go over the new Application Recovery and Restart API. The API itself is very small and very simple to use (which, in my opinion, is “A Good Thing” TM).

What is Application Recovery and Restart?  Application Recovery is a set of technologies that give applications the opportunity to control what actions are taken on their behalf by the system when they (the application) fail.

If the application registers a callback with the RegisterApplicationRecoveryCallback function, the system will execute the recovery callback on application failure. The application can that take action to do things like attempting to recover documents. If the application has not registered for recovery, the system attempts to diagnose and report the problem.

If the application registered a callback with the RegisterApplicationRestart function, the system will automatically restart the application after the recovery or diagnosis is completed. If the application has not registered for restart, the system will simply close the application.

Documentation

• Windows SDK
• RegisterApplicationRecoveryCallback
• RegisterApplicationRestart

Screencasts

• Windows Vista Restart & Recovery APIs from Managed Code

I had a fresh reminder of the exact reason why I love XNA so much. I figured that I wanted to brush up on my "1337 5k!llz" and that it was about time to get back into C++ stuff. Well, I love game development, so why not brush up by developing a game, right? Well, that was my thinking behind this whole story.

I've been a DirectX kind of guy ever since I started in game development. So, what the heck, I figured I would stir up the pot and try some OpenGL development in C++. Not a problem, there's a metric crap-ton of OpenGL tutorials over on NeHe that I can follow. Here I come "Creating a Window", YEE HAW! Visual C++ Express installed? CHECK. Windows SDK installed? CHECK. Visual C++ Settings pointing to new Windows SDK directories? CHECK. I'm ready to roll, all y'all. Let's get on with it homeboys.

So, open up the first tutorial, type in all the code for creating a window and clearing the screen....

....

DAMN, that was a LOT of typing. Holy moley, I could have developed a bad case of arthritis from the tutorial alone. Geez, how many lines of code is this? 400?!?!?!?!?!? 400 lines of code to get a BLANK WINDOW on the screen? WTF?!?!? Okay, forget getting my "1337 5k!llz" back in shape, I'm just going to spend that time continuing to work with XNA.

Perhaps to make it more "1337," I'll play around with the Lex/Yacc-type stuff in the Visual Studio SDK to write my own language that I can use as a custom scripting language in a game. Yummy.

TIMMMMMEH!!! TIMMMMMEH!!!