Doodle Graphics

TLA322: Writing a 3D Game in 60 Minutes

A walkthrough using the Spacewar Starter Kit, and turning it into a Space Invaders clone - not very 3D, as it was all top down, but I did learn where I went wrong adding my background in my own game - blending is important.

MS Exam 070-562: Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5 ASP.Net Application Development

I passed this one too! Great news! I'm now a Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist: .Net Framework 3.5, ASP.Net Applications - what a mouthful. Apparently I'm very good at configuring and deploying web applications , but a bit weak when it comes to targeting mobile devices - no real surprises there.

WIN305: Parallel Programming Techniques in F#

See my earlier comments, only this time, my brain really did melt. The good news is that Parallel classes are coming in System.Threading v4.0.

PDC307: Microsoft Visual Studio 10: Web Development Futures

First a quick re-cap of what we have in VS2008 SP1, and the out of band releases - -vsdoc.js based JavaScript ItelliSense support added through a hotfix, ASP.Net MVC already in beta, ASP.Net AJAX toolkits and jQuery support.

Then on to VS2010

The biggest change to "Design" is in CSS: It is now standards compliant, it has better support of selectors, and the renderer passes the Acid 1 test.

On the "Source" side, as mentioned previously, there's a large number of HTML snippets that have been added, and "Selection Expansion" was demonstrated (double clicking will expand your selection).

JavaScript IntelliSense is even more improved, a lot faster parsing of JS files to generate IntelliSense. Return types can be parsed from comments, and also it no longer falls over when you have bad scripts.

A whole new deployment story was announced, alongside the Web Config transforms mentioned before. By default transforms are created for each build configuration, Debug compilation is on by default, but off for release builds, and MSBuild will power your deployments.

In the Project properties, there's a new Publish tab, that will allow you to define how you publish the project - you can set up multiple profiles, with different servers, logins, deployment methods. The publish tools will finally allow you to "Skip extra files on the server" so it doesn't delete things it doesn't know about, you can automatically mark the project as an Application on the server, and there's a Publishing toolbar for "one click deployments" - an early offering of this can be found at DiscountASP's MS Deploy Lab.

Filed under: Conferences, Tech.Ed