Xbox One Indie Game Development – What We Know So Far

By Shahed C on October 17, 2013
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Feedback from ID@Xbox:

Chris Charla, Microsoft’s Director of ID@Xbox has this to say about my blog post: “That’s pretty good! Did you mention the free dev kits and the retail -> dev kit transition?”. In response to his feedback, I’ve updated the content, using quotes from Xbox News and Xbox Corporate VP Mark Whitten.

Updated Post:

Some of you may know that I am heading to Microsoft HQ in Redmond to attend the upcoming Xbox One Developer Summit, aka ID@Seattle. This is the first dev summit to welcome the new crop of developers who have signed up for ID@Xbox, the Xbox One’s Indie Developer Program.

I’ve signed an NDA for this event, and will not be revealing any confidential information during/after the event. So, I’ve put together the information below from everything that has already been announced in public.

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Storing and Retrieving Multiple Flags in an Integer

By Shahed C on October 5, 2013
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Many years ago, I taught myself game development from Andre LaMothe’s “Windows Game Programming For Dummies”. Back then, I was just learning about C/C++, Win32 and DirectX for making video games.

One of the interesting things I learned was about using bitwise operators to store multiple states in a single variable. This can still be useful in any C-derived language, such as C#. You can even use this technique in JavaScript!

Let’s say, your game character has a carry-on weapon bag with 8 available slots. Each slot can store 1 type of weapon.

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Presenting Entity Framework at GWU’s Graduate Computing Club

By Shahed C on September 21, 2013
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Having presented Entity Framework Code First Migrations at several venues throughout  this year, I will be presenting an EF intro session at George Washington University (GWU)

Sep27

GWU logo

GWU Graduate Computing Club (GCC)

  • Website: http://gcc.seas.gwu.edu/?p=78
  • Date/Time: Wednesday, September 27, 2013 at 6:00 PM
  • Location: George Washington University, Washington DC.

Diff’ing your code with Beyond Compare

By Shahed C on September 14, 2013
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Every now and then, I find a tool that I find useful enough that I want to recommend it to other developers. Beyond Compare is such a tool.

Available as a free trial from Scooter Software, Beyond Compare is “the ideal tool for comparing files and folders on your Windows or Linux system”.

BeyondCompare

 

In my current project, I am using TFS for source control and automated builds. When it is time to compare a file with previous versions of its code, the TFS file diff viewer leaves a lot to be desired.

Using a tool such as Beyond Compare, I have more control over performing file-diffs, and resolving conflicts. If you want to change your Visual Studio diff settings, follow the instructions outlined in the following Stack Overflow post:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4466238/how-to-configure-visual-studio-to-use-beyond-compare

Within my own project, I use Beyond Compare when merging code from a forked branch back into the main trunk. It’s very useful, and helps highlight problem areas.

I would highly recommend it! 🙂

 

Presenting EF Migrations at Caparea and RADNUG

By Shahed C on August 24, 2013
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Updates:

  • the presentation material and sample files are available on the Downloads page.
  • all speaking engagements have been added to a new Speaking page

Original Post:

Having presented Entity Framework Code First Migrations at Microsoft’s NoVA Code Camp earlier this year, I will be presenting at the following user group meetings:

Aug27 capnet

Capital Area .NET Users Group (CapArea)

Sep17

radnugLogo

Rappahannock Area Developers .NET Users Group (RADNUG)

  • Website: http://radnug.org/meetings/9-17-2013
  • Date/Time: Tuesday, September 17, 2013 – 6:30pm
  • Location: SimVentions building, 11905 Bowman Drive, Suite 501, Fredericksburg, VA
  • Special Instructions: Use the entrance that has 3 flag poles outside