August 2006 - Posts
Today a collegue had me flabbergasted by using the & operator in a boolean comparison like the following example.
return x & y;
Both x and y were booleans and I said "Hey you just forgot an &! A single & is a bitwise operator.". And he responded that this would work but that the behaviour of a single & is that it is not lazy evaluated (short-circuiting).
My knowledge about the csharp language is quite good as is my knowledge of the .net framework so this was quite a surprise!
The funny thing is that the msdn documentation about the & operator doesn't say anything about lazy evaluation while the documentation about the && operator also mentiones the & operator with boolean operands.
I failed for the Microsoft 70-300 examen this afternoon. I am disappointed in the result because I expected to pass. When I saw the score it felt very weird to see I had failed. I really don't have a clue which questions I did wrong.... so it is almost impossible to improve my knowledge for the next attemp.
The exam had three cases and each case had eleven questions. The cases itself were very easy and were interviews of people in a certain role.
The hardest part in this exam was the english language I think. I had several questions that I could anwser but I just didn't see the (multiple) options I expected. I chatted with some collegues afterwards and that told me that had the exact same problem and succeeded at the second attemp without studying just by getting other cases.
Too bad I did not have the time to give it a second go :-). I started at 13:00 and was finished two hours later. Too late for our office hours.
Yesterday I posted about a news scoop at Ars-Technica referring Game studio express. Microsoft already posted a press bulletin about this at their site (
here). But I wasn't aware of this.
Rob Tillie mentioned in the comments that he doesn't think that this is the successor.
I don't think it has anything todo with KPL, it's just VS with a couple of addons, so I guess we can write our new block buster xbox 360 game (which runs fine too on vista) in C# :)
Well this is sort of the mission statement that the KPL team had when they were thinking about the next version because the current KPL is too restricted in it's IDE when you want to take it a step further.
XNA brings xbox360 technology available on XP(+) and in a managed way. Previously we had Managed DirectX on top of DirectX but this isn't really supported anymore AFAIK. We cannot use it for xbox360 development either because it lacks the xbox feature set. Although you could argue for hours about this :-).
So now we have XNA! A neat and nice managed environment but we don't have the support from it from within Visual Studio. So Microsoft developed an extension called 'Game Studio Express' and not only does it support XNA it seemes that it also comes with some cool tooling like a modeller (why else would Autodesk be part of this). My guess is that is also has the nice high-level framework just like the KPL has to create tile based (horizontal/vertical scrollers) and (as Dennis said) simple 3d games with build-in physics which can be seen at the
XNA Team Blog. The example at their site shows some sort of
Marble Madness (a mid 80's game classis) on steriods.
So I will download the bits on august 30 because the beta will then be available according the press item.
I just read an article about a new product at
Ars-Technica called Game Studio Express that Microsoft is planning to launch.
Microsoft has a product called KPL (
Kids Programming Language) to easily create nice graphical applications in minutes. It lacks features in the IDE when you want to get deeper into certain stuff but it is a nice environment to learn basic programming skills. KPL is based on .net 1.1 and I think that KPL has now evolved in a more professional/mature product. I will read the
Microsoft Express page more often now because there isn't any information about Game Studio Express at this moment.