Dan Fernandez recently joined our team to work with Jeff, Charles, and the rest of the Channel 9 / On10 / etc. crew. Shortly after joining the team Dan approached me about the idea of being his co-host for a weekly show covering what's hot in developer news. For some reason which will remain a mystery...

The past few months have been keeping me pretty busy, as you might discern from the lack of blog entries. That's because after we shipped Visual Studio 2005 on November 7th I transferred into a new role at Microsoft. My new job is on the XNA team, which has me working in the Xbox group. It should go...

Channel9 just posted a video interview of Dan Fernandez, Brian Keller, John Wingfield, and Andy Dunn from the Coding4Fun team showing off some coding projects from the site.

Want to know more about how The Finalizer was built? In case you haven't seen it, The Finalizer is a BattleBot which is controlled by a .NET Compact Framework application running on a Pocket PC, and it can even be driven remotely using an XBox controller! Now you can read more in a case study that was...

The ZMan reports that Glenn on IRComm.net may have actually been the first Coding4Fun reader to post some flair . Thanks, Glenn!

Dystopia released their Half-Life 2 mod for download a couple of weeks ago and the response has been incredible! From Fuzzy: Our release weekend was huge, we've had over 100,000 downloads of the demo and we cracked a peak player count of 2000; higher than HL2DM! We're currently vying for the number 6...

Check out C-Jump . This is kind of like Chutes and Ladders - except that instead of Ladders, you have While loops, and instead of Chutes you have Goto's . I wish we had this stuff when I was a kid! It would be great to see a C# or Visual Basic version of this as well. Maybe Sesame Street could do a version...

Chris Williams has written another great article based on his Heroic Adventure! role playing game. This one is about giving your creatures (non-player characters, monsters, animals, etc.) an artificial intelligence engine to make them appear lifelike during the game. He goes into an amazing level of...

Alan Simes recently posted a fully C# version of Peter Walser's original IDX3D engine. You can download it here - it was built with the beta of Visual C# 2005 so you can download Express and compile it, or run the .EXE included with Alan's .ZIP to get a feel for the application. It's very performant...

Check out the latest Visual Studio / SQL Server marketing video/interactive presentation - there's not much "tech" here but the videos are actually pretty amusing. www.escapeyesterworld.com And if you're interested in creating your own "Mystery Science Theater-Style videos" it looks like you can buy...

This is a cool application that shows off the great developer API's that MSN Search enables. Gus Pinto wrote an application which "hosts" the MSN Search within his task bar for quick access and maximum screen real estate savings. Thanks to Gus for emailing us to tell us about it so we could share it...

In his latest article about Heroic Adventure , Chris Williams describes his approach for building maps in his RPG. Check it out: http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/articles/45539.aspx

This is a great article detailing how Bungie built Bungie.net using the .NET Framework. Bungie.net is your one-stop shop to find out all the latest Halo 2 news, and of course to check your stats! Check it out: Bungie.net Technical Case Study

These are classic! Thanks to Major Nelson for the post. I can still remember getting my first copy of Nintendo Power. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, A, B, Select, Start! Anyway - check out the ads here .

Just a quick post to let the Coding4Fun community know that there are no new articles this week since the Coding4Fun crew is at TechEd. We'll resume next week with some new content - see you then!

*3:49pm Edit to fix broken link. Chris Williams wrote an article talking about how he manages character inventory for his Visual Basic .NET-based RPG, Heroic Adventure . Check out the article here: http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/articles/40854.aspx Heroic Adventure looks really cool - I was...