What a fantastic event, Student Day (SD) attracted over 1200 students both from Universities and High Schools around NSW and some interstate. Student Day was the platform for the official launch of Microsoft Dreamspark and StudentstoBusiness (S2B) in Australia. If you haven't heard already, Dreamspark is a Microsoft student program designed to offer all tertiary students access to Microsoft’s designer and developer tools for FREE ! Dreamspark will also be rolled out to High Schools early next year.

OK it is the start of the long weekend – well once my wife gets back from school where she had just a little more to do to be ready for students on Tuesday. So it is time to think about some game news. OK so I’m thinking about more help to create games since I really think that turning consumers into creators should be a goal. So hear now the news. The Popfly team announces a bunch of new features. The Game Creator has gone from alpha to beta and with this there are badges to earn, new profile pages,

The Game Development in Computer Science Education conference has been renamed and this year’s event is called the Fourth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games . This is the premier educational conference for faculty who use game development to teach computer science concepts and principles. In the past we have had a small number of high school computer science faculty come on the conference but I am hoping that by giving people early warning we can get more this time. A lot

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/06/03/may-posts-in-review.aspx'; May was an interesting month for me in several ways. One area that I struggled with though was blogging. Perhaps it is because the school year is winding down but I could not seem to stay on a roll. Still there were a couple of posts that received a lot of traffic. XNA was big because of the Zune announcement. And people seemed to be interested in projects for use in their classrooms. I have a long post about

Well there are always questions about an handheld game device from Microsoft. Well this isn't it. But what the XNA team did announce today is that XNA Game Studio 3.0 will support creating games for the Zune. And yes there will be multi-player games using the Zune's built in networking. Now that should be interesting. The announcement on the XNA blog is here . There is also a FAQ on the Creators Club web forum. Read the FAQ here . One thing of note is that your games will have access to non-DRM music

Microsoft is Jump Starting the student developer with an offering of FREE developer tools. Just for being a student, you get professional-level developer and design tools as a download, at no-charge and with no strings attached. The DreamSpark offering of software compliments MSDNAA program and MSDN AA program continues in its current form. There has been a significant drop in Computer Science and engineering student enrollments in the US universities. A big part of this drop is the perception that

Dan Waters, a member of the Academic Relations team based in Florida, has been working on an XNA version of Pong as a tutorial for beginners. Last week Dan posted a link to the source code for people who are interested in playing with it. Dan isn't making any claims of brilliance for it and I haven't had a chance to try it out myself but I'm guessing this might be a piece of code a bright student might enjoy improving on themselves. The tutorial Dan has writen is clear and easy to follow. So this

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