Dan Fernandez's Blog

In case you haven't heard, this week is BillG's last week as a full-time Microsoft employee as he transitions to working full-time at his foundation. Sure, he'll still be the Chairman of the board and there are some projects that he will work with directly...

Adam Nathan recently blogged about some of the new features they've added to Popfly Game Creator including the color swapper for skinning actors, guidelines and snapping for aligning characters, actor stamping for easier tiling, new events, and the ability...

At TechEd this year, I gave what can only be described as an overly ambitious talk given I only had 45 minutes: Coding4Fun: The Secrets to Programming YouTube, iTunes, Microsoft Zune, Windows Vista Peer-to-Peer APIs, and Even World of Warcraft I say overly...

As I blogged about on Channel 9 earlier (I love that we can have text *and* video posts now), SQL Server 2008 RC0 is now available for download . On the download page, you may have noticed that there are two versions of SQL Server Express SQL Server 2008...

Ariel interviews Jeff Sandquist , my manager on scary VPs and the dfiference between evangelists and apologists .   Best quote: "When I first started here, I was terrified of the higher ups. They were almost like Santa Claus — these mythical...

I recently posted a high-level feature specification for version 2.0 of AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft on the projects Wiki which you can check out here .   Note: If you're new to Warcraft programming or are interested in getting started, I highly...

I just finished reading Mary Jo Foley's new (unauthorized) book, Microsoft 2.0 : How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post Gates-Era . Amusing Part #1 came for me when I read the forward which was written by Mini-Microsoft , in Mary Jo's words...

Popfly Game Creator Alpha launches today and It's amazing. Kudos to Adam Nathan as he's really shown how Silverlight can build incredibly rich applications. I can only imagine what he'll do when Popfly moves to Silverlight 2! Here's the Channel 9 interview...

I ran into this bug today which was unfortunately closed as can't repro. I was renaming some AppSettings variable names (right click on a Project's  Properties and go to the Settings tabs) and deleting some other settings, when I did a Search/Replace...

Live Mesh is a new technology and platform that enables synchronization and storage "to the cloud." It was officially unveiled tonight and lots of the usual suspects are providing their thoughts including Robert Scoble , Kip Kniskern from LiveSide , TechCrunch...

Read the article here I don't fully agree with the bullet point pet peeves as I think they're very useful for listing things like properties or using numbered lists for sequential events, but it's certainly a good list for anyone writing technical articles...

Crazy Idea #5150 Cue the background military music and authoritative announcer: Ten years ago / In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum...

In an on-going effort to ensure that Channel 9 videos only display appropriate content, the Channel 9 Dev Team recently ported the spam feature to filter existing video content. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by the results of our first tests...

Last updated: 6/30/08 NOTE: If you've been forwarded a link to this blog post, it's likely that one of your colleagues thinks you should do your due diligence before thinking a contest is the fastest road to salvation. It isn't, here's why... I...

Kudos to Ariel Stallings , Microsoft employee and author the Microspotting blog (one of my favorite new blogs) on landing a virtual Mini-Microsoft interview . My personal opinion of Mini is a bit mixed, and I've definitely disagreed with Mini in the past...

Kudos to the Popfly team for being nominated to C|Net's Webware 100 ! If you like Popfly, as John mentions , go out and vote for them

Speakers: Luis Villegas, Sean Shypula from Bungie Distributed client/server system split up, runs it in parallel processes user submitted tasks in parallel 180 rackmounted machines 300 processes can use Advantages speed up time consuming tasks - (rendering...

Speakers: MC of event, Jon Wood - Managing Editor MMORPG.com Jack Emmert - Founder, Cryptic Studios, Champions Online, City of Heroes/Villans One other person, Mark Jacobs or "Matt" from Cryptic Ray Muzyka - General Manager of Bioware, haven...

Speaker: Ray Kurzweil [Aside: One of the best talks I've ever been to...ever] Rough notes below Acceleration of Progress Studying exponential growth of technology Games are the cutting edge, VR will be more competitive VR advantages - become someone else...

Full Title: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed: How LucasArts is Building a Game Development Team and a Technology Pipeline...at the same time Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is a new, upcoming title Storyline: Darth Vader's secret apprentice, between episodes...

The US video game industry revenue is now $18 Billion and continues to grow. Games have not only surpassed the movie industry, they have also surpassed the music industry (source: Jupiter Research) 7 different Xbox titles sold over 1MM units in the 2007...

Speaker: Takao Sawano WiiFit Examples Family weighing themselves and tracking health Father doing push ups on balance board Mother doing yoga on the board Games: Kid taking headers playing soccer goalie Games: Grandfather using ski-jump Games: Mother...

Speaker: Rob Pardo, Blizzard Entertainment Rough notes below   Game Balance - solo to max level - important role in a group, raid, and group PVP - Starcraft - Race totally different - Better players can win games fast - Offense over defense (don...

Note: I'll be regularly blogging on session at GDC (Game Developer Conference) Rough notes Speaker: Scott Austin: Xbox LIVE Arcade, Microsoft I just interviewed Scott and we'll be posting the video on Channel 9 in the next few days Games N+ - Level editor...

DreamSpark is a new program that launched today (Feb 18th) at Stanford Univ. with Bill Gates giving the keynote. If you're a student you get Windows Server 2003 Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition Microsoft...