Not so Breaking News
…anymore anyway as even the sleepiest, under a rock living member of the XNA community will already know that our beloved local MVP extraordinary Catalin Zima got married the last weekend. Although life in the barracks is still on halt due to the impact of the party (albeit of the virtual form only) we like to share our congratulations with Catalin. So, here it comes: Congratulations, dude! (spectacular, ain’t it?)
In related news: Shawn Hargreaves put a ring on it (the ring finger), too, so we use this opportunity to also congratulate The Shawn!
P.S.: We place our bets on Andy Dunn to be the next to take the chance…
Silent And Quiet
It’s been some time since the last MVP Watch and it doesn’t seem that much has been missed…
Anyway, George W. “Bugbear” Clingerman feels unhated and so did Vincente “Bête Noire” Cartas, Chris G. “Daggers Drawn” Williams started something, Andy “Jealous as a Barbary Pigeon” Dunn likes to do the opposite, Charles “Demoniacal” Humphrey ain’t impressed, Jim “Philophilosophos” Perry reviews movies.
3D XNA Gizmo v0.2.0 Released!
Tom Looman has updated his 3D XNA Gizmo, adding support for rotation and scale.
You can go get the latest version of the library here.
OgmoXNA
Reaching us from Matt Sams, we got word of OgmoXNA, which "includes a set of content pipeline extensions to load Ogmo Editor's project and level files, and stuffs it all into an easy to a set of objects ready to be consumed by the developer".
"What is Ogmo Editor?", you might ask! It is a "general-purpose 2D visual level editor for independent game developers".
Also, if you have little love for the Content Pipeline (shame on you then!), Matt promises that future versions of OgmoXNA will include means of bypassing it and loading levels directly from XML, if you show enough interest.
More details from Matt, here.
The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!
In case, like me, you've been living under a rock, there has been an update to the Windows Phone 7 CTP that now supports Visual Studio 2010 RTM.
The main blog post from the WP7 dev team is Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh! and gives a great basic overview. If you want to get straight to the bits, that link is Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP - April Refresh. You will want to pay attention to the Release Notes this release as there are breaking changes if you have any projects created in the first CTP. There is also an overview of what has changed on MSDN, What's New in Windows Phone 7 CTP Refresh.
If you followed my post about Ultimate support (Windows Phone 7 Installation User Errors With Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate RC), there are a couple of caveats to uninstalling the RC bits. You may run into more problems when trying to install the CTP Refresh so hopefully this will help eliminate some headache ahead of time.
- Do not uninstall individual pieces like XNA or heaven forbid Visual Studio 2010 Express. The installer keeps track of everything it puts on your system and will proceed to add it back if it is missing. In the case of no VS2010, as The_Zman found out the hard way and had to reinstall the Express RC separate.
- The CTP leaves two things that the refresh needs to be removed before it will install: Silverlight 4 SDK and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express Prerequisites x86 or x64 depending on your system.
- I had a link to the Silverlight 4 Tools that have now been refreshed to RTM. That link is actually no longer needed as VS2010 RTM installs them for you.
Hope this reiteration will save some of you the grief The_Zman or ElementCy ran into. Happy hax0rin!