[Edit 1]During the recent Blogs.MSDN.com upgrade, this post was lost. I'm reposting it now, so the information can get back out there. [Edit 2] I realized recently that there are a couple of key pieces of information missing from this post, so I expanded...

My X3DAudio talk from Gamefest 2010 is finally posted, and available for download.  Here's the link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=00852bf5-714c-49e5-bcf2-b14881f8d007&displaylang=en . There's an audio recording, along...

Walked in to work today, and my boss' boss came into my office.  Oh crap, right, what did I do wrong?  How could I have screwed up over the weekend when I wasn't doing any work? No, nothing wrong.  He just had extra copies of a 360 game...

Shawn posted a great writeup today talking about the changes to RenderTargets in GS4. I recently helped a dev figure out how to use a RenderTarget in his game. He was using RTs for a common purpose; rendering a 3d model into a RT, and then using that...

When you decide to build a game for Windows Phone, the first thing you have to decide is whether you are building an XNA game or a Silverlight game.  Luckily, my team did a bit of research on this topic, and I wrote a whitepaper on this subject. ...

Now that Mix10 has come and gone, I can finally talk about what I’ve been working on for the last few months.  My team, the Advanced Technology Group (ATG), has been working closely with the Windows Phone and XNA Game Studio teams in order to help...

XAudio2 is Microsoft’s cross-platform game audio API.  XACT , which you may be familiar with from XNA Game Studio, is built on top of XAudio2. There are some key concepts in XAudio2 that we need to cover before I can into more interesting tips and...

First, joining an xbox team is just a lot of fun, especially compared to other teams I’ve joined.  I had people walking in all day giving me fun stuff. Don’t have a tv on your desk?  here’s one.  Don’t have an xbox in your office? ...

For the most part, moving during a Microsoft relocation is pretty stress-free.  Last Thursday, two guys showed up at about 8:30 in the morning, and started packing in the garage.  In my opinion, that was a genius move, since they were done with...

Just so we’re clear, all of the posts where I mention relo stuff are based on my experience the first time.  I’m not sure if these benefits are standard (though I think they are).  Your experience may vary from mine, so don’t quote me if something...

The hiring process doesn’t end when you accept the offer.  At least, not if you’re remote.  If you work in the same city as your destination team, the process is pretty much done.  Your new and old managers agree on a date, and you show...

Brad Wilson just posted his approach to handling the deluge of email here at Microsoft.  I use a different system than he does, so I thought I’d go ahead and post mine. I have three top-level folders in my Inbox.  Groups, Personal, and Projects...

I spent the last couple of days working on wrapping a native win32 api in managed code.  I’ve been tasked with working with the Task Scheduler portion of windows, which has a pretty good native API, but no managed API. I thought, ‘hey no problem...

Yesterday I got an email from the XNA Developer Connection team, containing my offer, and I accepted this morning! I’m incredibly excited to be starting a new job, on a new (to me) team, returning to my favorite discipline (dev), and working in the game...

Whew.  I’m tired after this week (well, last week, technically).  I was back in Redmond for my quarterly trip, and scheduled a few interviews. I had informational interviews with two teams, and started with one interview loop scheduled. ...

The second week of my job search was full of negative responses, with one positive response to lift the darkness.  The positive response was from a team in Windows Server, building a pretty cool new product.  Since this was an app, rather than...

Game studios want you have to have commercial game experience before you apply.  You can’t get commercial game experience without working at a game studio.  What do you do? First, there are other options.  It’s not as hopeless as it seems...

During week 1 and 2, I set up a saved search on the internal site, and starting digging through the available jobs.  I’m looking at all software development engineer (SDE or dev) jobs in Redmond.  I’m looking for jobs that are at my level, 1...

First, some information, so we’re all on the same page.  Internal transfers at Microsoft work just like the external hiring process.  We go to an internal version of http://www.microsoft.com/careers/ , which has all the same jobs.  We get...

In my last post, I talked about how I’m a semi-happy employee.  The reason I’m only semi-happy is that I work remotely, from my house.  Many folks think that working remotely is the bees’ knees.  For some people, it may be.  For me...

Here I am, yet another Microsoft blogger.  As is customary, I want to open with a little description of who I am, and where I come from. I'm a mostly-happy Microsoft employee.  I spent the first three years of my career in the test discipline...