Dan Fernandez's Blog

Woohoo! From Joystiq, Bioware has officially spilled the beans that they are building a MMO based on the Knights of the Old Republic game. The first KOTOR game was amazing, clearly one of the best Xbox games ever and an amazing twist at the end...in short, a masterpiece.

Hotness!

 Here are the notes from the Future of MMO's panel in February at GDC that included Ray Muyzka from Bioware

Yes, it's Bill's last day, here's a collection of videos for your viewing pleasure:

• Channel 9: Bill Gates: Transitioning into the Future
• Channel 9: This Week on Channel 9 with Jeff Sandquist and Bill Gates stories
• Channel 9: 'Softies share their Bill Gates stories
• MS PressPass: Bill Gates Looking Backing, Moving Ahead
• CNN: Bill Gates Slideshow narrated by Bill Gates
• MSNBC: Tom Brokaw interview with Bill Gates

You should also check out the Bill Gates Retirement Party on Gizmodo and Bill Gates Day on Engadget

There was a company meeting today at 9am to say goodbye to Bill with Bill and Steve. MSNBC wrote an article on the meeting, here's a quick snippet:

On his final full day at Microsoft Corp., Bill Gates went on stage to reminisce with his longtime friend Steve Ballmer, and neither man could hold back tears as Ballmer handed Gates a large scrapbook as a farewell present.

...

..He was introduced to fellow freshman Ballmer by a mutual friend. On their first date, they went to the movies to see an unlikely back-to-back showing of "Singing in the Rain" and "A Clockwork Orange."

Ballmer, who has famously danced and jumped around stage at conferences, described a similarly silly and uninhibited Gates that evening.

"So we come back from the movie, we're kind of dancing, we're both kind of playing Gene Kelly, and some guy wrestles me to the ground in our dorm," Ballmer said. It fell to Gates, who hardly qualifies as burly, to fend off the fellow student.

Bill, you will be missed :(

Margaret Rouse from the Overheard blog calls me out for dying my hair blonde:

I’m a big Dan Fernandez fan — but I had a hard time watching this video because I kept thinking “why did you bleach your hair?”

Now Margaret has nice things to say about me (thank you!), but I was a bit taken back because I never thought my hair was a distraction. I will say I have more fun being blonde (yes the rumors are true) and oddly enough, I eat healthier in some unexplained subconscious need to keep up with appearances while I'm blonde.

What do you all think?

Brunette	Blonde

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, but it is still a bit weird to think about Microsoft without Bill Gates.

In this 30 minute Channel 9 interview with Charles Torre, you'll hear Bill talk about his transition, Ray Ozzie, competing against Google, improving Microsoft's agility, what's going to be important for our platform in the next decade and of course Bill's role at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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 to clone a level!

All-in-all, this should make building games using Popfly even easier.

Check out Adam's post for the full details.

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 ambitious as YouTube, Vista P2P, and Warcraft could easily have been dedicated 75 minute sessions so covering all of them enough to be meaningful in 45 minutes was....a challenge. As promised, here's a quick recap of my slides and code. The full slide deck can be found here, and thanks everyone for showing up!

iTunes

• Demo project shows using the iTunes COM library to play, pause, move backwards and forwards through tracks, and how to search your iTunes music collection
• Download: Code in VB and C#

Peer-to-Peer using the Coding4Fun P2P Toolkit

World of Warcraft

• The first WOW demo, WriteData, showed how .NET applications can share information with a Lua AddOn by updating an AddOns files or its saved variables. It effectively uses an AddOn's saved variables as a "communication bridge" that a .NET application can read or write to. The challenge here is that if you make a change to the saved variables, they will not be picked up by Warcraft until you reload the UI so it isn't an "instant" communication bridge.
• The second WOW demo was where I showed AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft, which is a sweet (if I may say so myself) example of what you can do with the Visual Studio Shell to build a custom IDE for *anything*, including World of Warcraft. In the demo (you can see almost the same demo given at TechEd Europe), I show how to capture the PLAYER_TARGET_CHANGED and COMBAT_LOG_EVENT_UNFILTERED (the new 2.4 combat log) events. If the target changed, the code examines the level of the target and changes a Texture based on whether it's a lower, same, or higher level than me. For the combat log events, If there are multiple kill events within 15 seconds, it'll play some Halo audio clips.
• Download: AddOn Studio sample projects

Resources

• InnerTube Demo – Coming Soon!
• iTunes COM SDK (Library ships with iTunes)
• Zune DB API (ships with Zune), tutorial available here
• ffmpeg - The Swiss army knife of media format conversion 
• YouTube API
• Coding4Fun P2P Toolkit
• AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft
• Halo Game sounds
• World of Warcraft Programming Book
• Channel 9 
• Coding4Fun Book – Coming Soon, Pre-order now!
• Coding4Fun Site

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

1. SQL Server 2008 Express
2. SQL Server 2008 Express with Advanced Services

While the SQL Server 2008 Editions page doesn't list the "Advanced Services" Express Edition, luckily Mike Wachal from the SQL Server Express team posted a detailed breakdown of the differences on the SQL Server Express blog.

The key features that are in Advanced Services that you won't get with regular Express are:

• PowerShell integration by default
• Synchronization Services installed by default

As well as a number of Reporting Services features

• Ability to increase Reporting Services Memory Limit
• Reporting Services Word/Rich Text Export
• IIS Agnostic Report Deployment
• Enhanced Gauges and Charting

It also appears that the regular SQL Server Express also supports installing the 32-bit version on a x64 platform (using WoW), but as both Express versions including 32-bit and 64-bit native installations, I'm not sure why you would want to install the 32-bit version on x64.

What hasn't changed

The physical limitations for SQL Server haven't changed between 2005 and 2008 (1 CPU, 1GB Memory, 4GB of user data per database), but the nice thing is that SQL Server Express will take advantage of multiple cores on a single CPU.

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 figures running these billion dollar businesses."

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 recommend getting World of Warcraft Programming: A Guide and Reference for Creating WoW Addons (Wiley Page) my full 5/5 star review is here.

Better yet, Gabor Ratky sent me some sneak peek screenshots of the new features in builds and it's very cool stuff.  Below is just a quick sampling and is not the full list of features and the vast majority are based directly on feedback from the project's Issue Tracker (the full list has been copy/pasted at the bottom of this email).

Import from WowAce repository

Be able to instantly open and import any of the 600+ WowAce AddOns without having to manually save files to disc and then build a custom project. The vast majority of this work is possible because of the reuse of AnkhSVN.

Table of Contents (TOC) File structure support

v1 of AddOn Studio automagically build the TOC file for you, but in some cases, this was a bad thing as developers need control of the order of files in the TOC or what files to include/exclude. Version 2 adds the ability to easily and graphically modify the TOC file order and files.

Dramatically improved support for WYSIWYG

Version 2.0 makes a big step forward in WYSIWYG support by adding much deeper support for BLP and Blizzard textures. In fact, one of the key things the team is doing is testing the built-in Blizzard frames to see how well they render directly in the designer. While I don't know if this will ever be perfect, it's remarkable how close it can get.

Graphical/GUI testing with WowBench

One of the difficulties in testing AddOns is that you have to fully exit and reload Warcraft for every single change. This can be both tedious and time-consuming. WowBench is an open source project that enables you to simulate events in Warcraft, it's basically a big mock object.  Let's say you want to simulate what happens when a player changes his target. You can use WowBench to fake firing the target changed event and see what your code does from there. The next version of AddOn Studio integrates WowBench directly into the IDE (instead of via command line) so you can run commands directly against the world and addon as well. This will be a "must-have" feature for debugging and testing addons.

Loading the world

Debugging the Outfitter AddOn

Again all of this is subject to change and there are also several more features being added in the future.

Here's the full list of work items addressed in version 2.0

• Work Item: Add: Import Existing AddOn
• Work Item: Add: Add Subversion check-in/check-out Window
• Work Item: Add: Improve the auto-generated TOC experience/check-out Window
• Work Item: Add designer support for different frames
• Work Item: Designer support for texture browsing
• Work Item: Add WYSIWYG for different fontstring sizes
• Work Item: Designer should not replace XML
• Work Item: Renaming Frame.xml file does not rename <script> tag
• Work Item: AddOn Studio not rendering Blizzard FrameXML files
• Work Item: Add GUI for WowBench function emulator
• Work Item: Add Immediate Window for lua functions
• Work Item: IntelliSense support missing for Lua functions
• Work Item: Add IntelliSense support for Wow Globals
• Work Item: IntelliSense doesn't show up for locals or custom functions
• Work Item: IntelliSense shows local declarations out of their scope

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, Microsoft's most (in)famous internal blogger.

It's an entertaining read for me personally for a couple of reasons, like the fact that friends, colleagues, and other cool projects at Microsoft are mentioned (including me which was a complete surprise), and because Mary Jo has a much broader view of all of Microsoft than so many of us have and it's fascinating to hear Mary Jo's balanced views on what she thinks is in store for the future of Microsoft.

I'll post a more detailed review some time later, but as other folks might find this interesting, here's the list of current and former 'softies mentioned in the book in alphabetical order by first name:

1. Abolade Gbadegesin
2. Adam Barr
3. Alexander Gounares
4. Amitabh Srivastava
5. Bill Buxton
6. Bill Gates
7. Bill Hilf
8. Bill Veghte
9. Bob Muglia
10. Brad Goldberg
11. Brad Silverberg
12. Brian Arbogast
13. Brian McAndrews
14. Chris Jones
15. Cori Hartje
16. Craig Mundie
17. Dan Fernandez
18. Dan Kasun
19. Dare Obasanjo
20. Dave Cutler
21. David Treadwell
22. David Vaskevitch
23. Don Ferguson
24. Don Mattrick
25. Eric Rudder
26. Grant George
27. Horacio Gutierrez
28. Iain McDonald
29. J Allard
30. J.D. Meier
31. James Hamilton
32. Jason Zions
33. Jim Allchin
34. Jon DeVaan
35. Jon Rosenberg
36. Julie Larson-Green
37. Kathleen Hogan
38. Kevin Johnson
39. Kevin Turner
40. Kurt DelBene
41. Lewis Levin
42. Lili Cheng
43. Mark Lucovsky
44. Marshall Phelps
45. Martin Taylor
46. Mike Sievert
47. Mike Walker
48. Mini-Microsoft
49. Pat Helland
50. Randy Granovetter
51. Ray Ozzie
52. Robbie Bach
53. Robert Herbold
54. Robert Scoble
55. Sam Ramji
56. Satya Nadella
57. Scott Di Valerio
58. Scott Guthrie
59. Soma Somasegar
60. Stephen Chapman
61. Stephen Elop
62. Steve Ballmer
63. Steve Berkowitz
64. Steve Guggenheimer
65. Steve Liffick
66. Steven Sinofsky
67. Tami Reller
68. Ted Kummert
69. Tom Gibbons
70. Yusuf Medhi

Biggest shocks that weren't named in the book in some capacity

• Lisa Brummel, Christopher Liddell, Paul Flessner, and Anders Hejlsberg

* Updated 5/6 to add Adam Barr who's blog was listed in the appendix on Mary Jo's short list

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 with Adam building three Popfly games from scratch
• Here's how difficult it was to make games before Popfly

While Popfly Game Creator is designed for non-developers, I'm sure many developers will also want to have fun with it, so here's my quick explanation of Popfly for .NET developers.

Scenes == A Windows Forms/ASP.NET Page Designer: Scenes are the equivalent to a Window or ASP.NET page. You can have multiple scenes in an application, you'll get a start, main, and end scene to begin with, and you can of course switch to a certain scene based on something happening in the game (ex: taking a transporter, dying, etc). In a specific scene, you will go go in and add your actors to the scene in a visual layout.

Actors == Form/Page Controls: Actors are any object you place in a scene. Here's a screenshot and notice that everything, including the background is an actor.

Game == Files/Properties: This is where you can add properties like a game score, or add custom files like pictures of friends.

Behaviors == Brains: Behaviors are the brains of a Popfly game. A scene can have behaviors (like to reset a score when it loads) and each actor can have behaviors. To set behaviors, look for this icon

If you want an actor (control) to move around, play a sound, shoot, appear, disappear, etc, this list of behaviors is what you'll want to click and specify

Here, for example, are a set of behaviors for a car that add steering, adding to the high score and disappearing when the game is over

Shortcuts == IntelliSense Code Snippets: One of the convenience things that the Popfly team did was add shortcuts which are a pre-built set of behaviors. What this means is that rather than having to manually add behaviors for moving up/down/left/right using arrow keys, you can just select that shortcut and it will automagically add those behaviors to the selected actor.

And of course, as developers, you simply need to look for the Code icon to drop into custom XAML and JavaScript, but one can only imagine how nice it'll be when they add VB/C# support in Silverlight 2.

Kudos to the team, Popfly Game Creator rocks!

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 for the entire solution and somehow wound up with a duplicate Settings.Designer.cs file named Settings1.Designer.cs. This was effectively a clone of Settings.Designer.cs which meant:

• IntelliSense would report that any AppSettings variables were declared multiple times
• The project wouldn't compile because the variables were already declared

The fix was to

• From the Error menu, double click the Settings1.Designer.cs file to open it. Right click on the file and select Open Containing Folder and backup the the offending file(s) first (just in case).
• After backing up, delete the Settings1.Designer.cs file
• Switch back to VS and ensure Show All Files is selected in the Solution Explorer
• Expand Settings.settings in the Solution Explorer and manually delete Settings1.Designer.cs (and if prompted say yes to removal from source control)
• Select Build...Clean Project... (or Solution as appropriate)

You should be good to go, if you get an error about a missing file, you may need to manually open your csproj or sln file in Notepad and ensure that the MSBuild script doesn't contain a link to Settings1.Designer.cs.

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, and of course Mary Jo Foley who also provides the Live Mesh architecture diagram below.

For more Live Mesh coverage:
- Live Mesh home
- Watch the application demo of the Live Mesh application on Channel 10
- Watch the interview with Ray Ozzie introducing Live Mesh on Channel 9
- Watch an interview with Abolade Gbadegesin on Live Mesh Architecture on Channel 9
 

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 security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... The A-Team.

Apparently I'm not the only one who's thought of this, according to Wikipedia's A-Team entry - "In 2003, in research conducted by web-portal Yahoo! amongst 1,000 television viewers, "The A-Team" was voted as the one "oldie" television programme viewers would most like to see revived, beating out other popular televisions series from the 80s such as The Dukes of Hazzard and Knight Rider."

The A-Team had a huge following and still has a cult status among many of the fans who watched the show while growing up. There's no doubt in my mind that this show would be a hit if it's written well.

My advice would be to do it, but instead consider a deeper, darker, modern version, and keep it on cable (Spike, HBO, Showtime, A&E).

Modernize the story

• Surround the story around Green Beret or Army Ranger veterans from Afghanistan, maybe have the back-story be how the A-Team stopped atrocities by Blackwater mercenaries and thus were ousted by commanders who had a financial interest in ensuring that Blackwater "runs" Afghanistan.
• Go Darker - People actually die, everyone wears flack jackets, real military techniques are used, and go global instead of being primarily in the US.

My Dream Team of Characters

BA Baracus aka Mr. T
In some ways, this is the easiest to cast. Mr. T should be played by none other then backyard brawler turned Internet legend Kimbo Slice. If you're not familiar with Kimbo, watch him crush opponents in his YouTube videos

Mr. T

Kimbo Slice

Face
There's a couple of different ways I think Face could go.

Face Option #1 - Owen Wilson - One way would be to be the trip-over-himself adorableness of Owen Wilson. It's a different take on Face who was Mr suave, but I think it could work, especially if you see the option for Murdock from below. Oh and women are crazy about him and he could play the whole "Hollywood" thing.

Face	Owen Wilson

Face Option #2 - This may seem like an odd casting, but if you imagine a deeper/darker version of the A-Team, Skeet has the troubled pretty-boy thing going on and you could easily see him as a darker, tougher, seducer. Plus, no one really believes Face as in the army :)

Face	Skeet Ulrich

Murdock

Murdock Option #1 - Will Ferrall - Perhaps this is too easy a casting, but I could certainly imagine Will Ferrall as a mental patient, plus his chemistry with Owen Wilson as Face would be, as has been proven in Old School, Wedding Crashers, etc, be hilarious.

Murdock

Will Ferrall

Murdock Option #2 Nick Swardson - Another great option would be Nick Swardson of Benchwarmers, and Reno 911 fame. Nick's Reno 911 character shows he can play a compulsive liar which isn't a stretch to play a mental patient, plus, if you modernize the A-Team, perhaps Murdock would be homosexual which may be a more believable reason for Mr. T to not like him, but homophobia by the most masculine character may feel a bit too formulaic.

Murdock

Nick Swardson

Murdock Honorable Mention - Mitch Hedberg - While Mitch passed away due to a drug overdose, he would have been a perfect Murdock, you can't understand what he's saying half the time, he's burst funny, and he looks like he could have served as a helicopter pilot and gone crazy as a result.  If you're not familiar with Mitch Hedberg, do yourself a favor and buy his CDs, you'll thank me later.

Murdock

Mitch Hedberg

Hannibal

Hannibal Option #1 - William Hannibal Macy - Okay, his middle name isn't Hannibal, but he could certainly play the part.

Hannibal

William H. Macy

Hannibal Option #2 - Lawrence Fishburne - He can certainly play the part of a lead of ex-Military-gone mercenaries, he's got that older charisma, and he's got that bit-of-cool that Hannibal exuded, I could see him laughing with sunglasses whilst smoking a cigar.

Hannibal

Lawrence Fishburne

Who would be in your A-Team Dream Team?