Hiya! Rob here, just popping in on the team's new blog for a quick sec before I head off to Canada. If you have the Guitar Hero X-Plorer controller for the XBox360, here's the XNA application that will let you play Ireland's Call (a.k.a. "The Rugby Song") on your PC or XBox360. This was my finale at Rob's Last Stand last week. This game is a bit more "free form" than the real Guitar Hero, in that you aren't prompted visually with when you should play each chord. Instead, as you play, fireworks go

When the XNA-fuelled fireworks were over at yesterday's Last Stand in Dublin (literally and figuratively) I was totally lost for words. When does that ever happen?! What I really want to say most is thank you - especially to Clare Dillon, Philip McKeown, Fergal Breen and everyone else at Microsoft, MTUG, IrishDev and beyond who made my time with the Ireland developer communities so enjoyable. I love the communities because you guys WANT to be there and so it makes it worth my while to shower you

Here's a flock of butterflies, brought to you in XNA, which can soar around their environment with the help of the Wii controller. By tilting and rolling the Wiimote, you can control the flight of the lead butterfly. The rest of the flock sticks together, chasing you wherever your accellerometer-fuelled flights of fancy take you. All the butterflies, including the one controlled by the Wiimote, avoid collisions with eachother, as well as with the features of the environment. [ Update: After showing

I was excited to see a good friend, Mona, start blogging about her experience running a science center located north of the arctic circle. It's fascinating reading. They're designing interactive exhibits and experiments: everything from visualizing DNA to creating 5-meter-high geisers of Coke and computer-controlled Lego greenhouses . Mona has a background in marine microbiology, she's an innovative teacher, and her science center is situated in the Northern Lights Planetarium in Tromsø, northern

One of my favourite game designers of all time, Tim Schafer (Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Psychonauts) once hammered home during a talk at the Game Developers Conference that all games are wish fulfillments . That probably explains why I played a lot of Guitar Hero 2 this week. (I was having trouble with the licks 'til I remembered Strong Bad's guitar advice , and then it all came back to me. And Uncle Bob, if you're reading this, yes I will pick up the real guitar again now.) Did you know that

"Orcas" is the codename for the next release of Visual Studio, which will allow you to develop applications using .NET versions 2.0, 3.0 and the up-and-coming .NET 3.5. The .NET Framework 3.5 introduces no breaking changes, but it does include some exciting new functionality. You can explore the new features in "Orcas" using its March Community Tech Preview (CTP) . The CTP is conveniently distributed as a Virtual PC (VPC) image that contains a full install of Visual Studio codename "Orcas," as well

Microsoft Research TechFest provides a forum for Microsoft researchers to connect with the broader group of Microsoft employees and product managers. The good news is that the Channel 9 video brigade was out in full effect at TechFest 2007 , which took place a few weeks ago. The event featured over 150 new demos and 24 lectures. Galleries, videos and demos from the event are now available online. Everyone's going to have their own interests, so I'd encourage you to click through and check it out

An imminent update to the XNA Framework will allow for sharing of packaged XNA Game Studio Express Games. Developers will be able to package their binary games into a single file to share with other users of XNA Game Studio Express. These files can be emailed or hosted on websites like any other files. To run a game, you just double click a file and it will unpack to your Windows-based PC or Xbox 360 console. Now XNA can really enable the "YouTube of Games." Check out the other announced features

If there's one thing that the XBox teams seem to nail, it's the community orientation of sites like the new XNA Creators Club . It's the shiny new hub for all things XNA, including samples, downloadable games, video tutorials, developer forums, and more. I authenticated at the site in a few seconds using my Passport and XBox Live ID, and created a game-dev-oriented profile there. As always , I am YumYumMoose at the Club, and look forward to creating with you there. Game Developers Conference 2007

I've mentioned the XNA Animation Component Library in passing in my last two posts on XNA, so I wanted to take a moment to direct you toward the XNA Animation Component Library. I will confess: there is a reason it took me a while to launch myself into XNA. The original challenge I'd set myself was to re-create my old brain-controlled game, Mind Balance . But Mind Balance uses a type of animation for its creatures called skinned mesh deformation, during which the character is deformed by using weights