I have been remiss in following news at Very Silly Games this summer. Fortunately for me Brian Scarbeau has been paying better attention. From his blog I found out that Rob Miles is about ready to release some curriculum materials for teaching programming using XNA. Rob has written a great text book called Microsoft® XNA Game Studio 2.0: Learn Programming Now! that I know a lot of teachers are using. Having some curriculum materials from Rob seems very interesting to me. Rob says “ It will be based

I just found out about the RampUp program. Briefly this is a program that lets people sign up for and take online training on various Microsoft developer technology such as web development and Visual Studio. There are special tracks for Java developers and for developers who want to upgrade their skills from Visual Basic 6.0 to Visual Basic .NET. Speaking of the later, the description is: Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 is the ideal environment for a Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 developer to extend existing

Well I'm on the road again. Today I am flying to Miami for the Game Development in Computer Science conference . The conference takes place on a cruise ship so there is no Internet or cell phone coverage - at least not as a reasonable price. So I'm posting a few things in advance in hopes that you will not miss me. Since I am in gaming sort of mind I thought I'd pass on some links to a series of posts by Betsy Aoki . The series involves creating a simple 2D game in XNA that involves collision detection.

make your development experience 1000% smoother Full details and links to the videos may be found

The SIGCSE mailing list recently had a long discussion about plagiarism in the context of philosophy of teaching statements being submitted with applications for professorial jobs. While the discussion on plagiarism was interesting what got me thinking was my the idea of a statement of teaching philosophy. Specifically what was mine? When I think back on the best teachers I ever had, ever worked with, and what I saw as what I copied about them several things came to mind. Knowledgeable Enthusiastic

I must confess that I am not a serious gamer. I am not serious about playing games and I am not all that fond of games that are too serious. I'm more interested in creating games than in playing them but honestly I don't want to work all that hard on it anymore. So what I am always looking for are simple and light weight games to create and/or play. So obviously when a site called Very Silly Games opens up it gets my attention. Rob Miles has opened this site . He claims that it is not a blatant attempt

Over at the XNA blog they have announced that XNA Game Studio Express version 2.0 has now been released. Full information and links to the download may be found here . Unlike the beta the released version allows PCs and Xbox 360s to communicate over the network. There are other changes and enhancements as well but the XNA team does a much better job of explaining them than I could hope to. BTW if you are using XNA GSE and have questions you will want to know about the XNA Forums . These forums are

The folks over at Channel 9 have posted a really good video on the five most important methods in XNA Game Development called - XNA Development Part 3: The Five Essential Gaming Methods Jennifer Marsman walks through the essential methods that you need to understand in order to develop a Windows or XBOX 360 game using the XNA Framework. Once you've seen it if you don't already have the XNA Game Studio Express (did I mention that it is free!) you can get it here . And while you are at it check out

There really aren't a lot of books on XNA available yet (though some are coming) and real textbooks seem to be trailing the rest of the books. None of that is stopping the really innovative teachers though. Not in universities, not in community colleges and not even in high schools. Brian Scarbeau has been blogging about his plans for an XNA-based high school computer science course next year. At his post you will find some discussion of scope and sequence as well as information about the resources

I see that Dare Obasanjo has updated his wonderful article on C# From A Java Developer's Perspective . It's a great read and if you are a Java programmer (or have students who know Java) and want to get into some of the things that are cool about C# like XNA Game Studio or Microsoft Robotics Studio that article may be just the place to start. Please vote! var bt_counter_type=1; var bt_project_id=1181; Technorati tags: Csharp , Java , programming