Words And Pages
The Great Quiet is over in XNA MVP land as Chris G. “Avatar” Williams and George W. “Vatara” Clingerman break the news about their collaboration on the pamphletupcoming bestseller aptly titled “Professional Windows Phone 7 Game Development: Creating Games using XNA Game Studio 4”.
Meanwhile Andy “Ratava” Dunn ponders self publishing, asking for feedback.
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.
Bacon And Blood
Catalin “Belgian Blue” Zima reflects about his 2009. Glenn “Gloucester” Wilson samples the touches, George G. “Dølafe” Clingerman touches the samples and Joel “Gloucester” Martinez touches smoothly.
Meanwhile, on a Saturday night at 2:20 Pieter “Dajal” Germishuys talks about drinking coffee. The day after Andy “Blonde d'Aquitaine” Dunn runs 50 miles.
Chris G. “Red Angus” Williams fears small people, frags for charity and Goerge W. “Dølafe” Clingerman downplays his contribution.
[Ed.: Somehow the relevance of the subjects actions of this very series is not what it used to be, resulting in a sort of dilemma of what to actually share here. Today's nick names ain’t the most inspired either…]
Depth And Games
Matt “Blitzkrieg” Pettino fights with the depth buffer and Charles “One” Humphrey flags bits in XNA.
Meanwhile, George W. “The Frayed Ends of Sanity” Clingerman stares at walls, not goats and Chris G. “Fade to Black” Williams says Good Night.
Glenn “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” Wilson installs the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP finally, Jon “Escape” Watte releases a beta of kW X-port 1.4.5 for 3DS Max 2010 and in a desperate move Andy “Harvester of Sorrow” Dunn begs for common sense to be applied during peer review. Following the lead of desperation, Iñaki “Whiplash” Ayucar fulminates against clones, strongly.
John “Motorbreath” Sedlak has a new jacket, with a back, plays games, writes cryptic code. Joel “Ride the Lightning” Martinez loves LINQ and threats to release a game. Finally, Chad “Hit the Lights” Carter is a happy daddy.
The Sheep And The Butcher
Joel “Desperation” Martinez fears the loathing in FarmVille. Chad “Rage” Carter discovers that all men are created unequal, while Jim “Thinner” Perry doesn’t. In between Chris G. “The Gunslinger” Williams ponders alternative careers and recommends Dead Girl.
Catalin “The Colorado Kid” Zima is impressed by the hidden gems in talks performed by The Shawn, which raises the interests of one Andy “The Regulators” Dunn. Pieter “The New Lieutenant's Rap” Germishuys is happy about the current evolution of the software industry.
Richard “Roadwork” Thomson will be presenting 3 sessions during the upcoming Utah Code Camp (free, upcoming being March 27th, 2010).
Meanwhile, John “Stationary Bike” Sedlak gets spiritual and George W. “Dreamcatcher” Clingerman is asleep.
Jekyll And Hyde
The week starts off with Catalin “Dan Briggs” Zima not being amused about the lack of support MS shows for Romania, followed by a Charles “Rex Rupert John George Robert Andrew Sinclair Earl of Mannoc” Humphreys in excitement, which finds an abrupt ending and Joel “Sandy Ricks” Martinez living on ancient hardware.
Ignoring the misery of his fellow champs Jim “Red Forman” Perry mourns the loss of ancient arts, this time The Art of Debugging, which Andy “John Steed” Dunn wonders how to apply to the wandering to off-topic Kinder on the forums.
Meanwhile, George W. “Dr. David Banner” Clingerman goes mean. Yep, that’s right: the “group hug, peace and love” MVP is the bully MVP now. And then he shows off. At least he ain’t meaning his kids…
Suffering from external mischief Chris G. “Bosco Albert Baracus” Williams is totally amazed and disappointed. He’s also giving strange hints about his whereabouts…
MVP Weekend
George W. “The Desperate” Clingerman plans something spectacular XNA related for this weekend. You have to see the excitement here in the barracks: everyone’s running around, waving the arms in the air, the Sarg’s hyperventilating and Catalin’s worried about the peer pressure to counter the outcome…
Meanwhile, Chris W. “The Fool” Williams doesn’t like to be called a tool and Jim “The Tool” Perry still pretends to be the Evil MVP, without actually pulling an apple.
The Brotherhood
Catalin “Gone Green” Zima recycles posts on Sgt. Conker to feature John “Snow Shovel Master” Sedlak once again.
Jon “Last of the Mohicans” Watte ponders the future of PC gaming and is reflecting about the quality of his subtle way to ask questions.
Andy “Master Of The Brotherhood” Dunn will not put Chris G. “Walk Like An Egyptian” Williams onto his list, but onto the Adult Friend Finder one.
Chad “I Wrote Some Books” Carter encourages the Sarge to pick up SBARG again.
Vincente “Works On Boring Things” Cartas lobbies for Phil “The Quiet Veteran” Bourke (and so do we: IGDA members vote for Phil!).
Loïc “Epsicode And Not-A-MVP” Dansart (the Little Gamers: Teh Game chap) dropped the 1st public screenshot of his Dream Build Play entry.
Glenn “Legendary Seeker” Wilson seeks reasons for an academic XNA Code Camp in Victoria.
About Language
Iñaki “Visionary” Ayucar starts the week with an introduction to or of (depending on whom [or is it who?] you ask) Extension Methods and why they rock and why you most certainly want to use them for, like, everything.
On a bright Tuesday morning, George W. “The Giant” Clingerman pushes some very dark clouds onto the sky by publicly expressing his strong feelings for regions to organize code (that’s a +1e100 reputation thing; As a service for your memory: regions were introduced to hide the verbose, designer create code blobs in Windows Forms et al. when C# did not support partial classes.), finding a strong supporter in Vincente “1.8” Cartas.
To break the flow here’s a tiny, tiny photo of the XNA MVPs at the MVP Summit 2010:
Photo © 2010 Microsoft Corporation
Benjamin "The Invisible Yet Photographable MVP" Nitschke has some more photos from the Summit in Seattle 2010 (that’s the year of the happening, not the number of photos…).
John “Don’t Quote That” Sedlak playstests games.
Pedro D. “Talking Head” Güida has been granted a MAP award (yep, that’s right: there’s a “Microsoft Active Professional” award program for “professionals who are considered to be among the top 5% of most active contributors in the community”, which, basically, translates to “You talk a lot”).
Elsewhere, Andy “Sparkly Crown Jewels” Dunn and Chris G. “Fighter” Williams (who’s already on the meet the team page [hrm, when did that one get updated? Lat I looked, which was not that long ago, it featured fewer members…]) go commando in support of VB.NET, while Jim “Reads a Legend” Perry stays on the other side of the fence (or so). Later, after the dust of the epic and never ending battle settled, Chris G. “Equalizer” Williams embraces all languages (but not PHP).
The best news to last: George W. “Dance Time” Clingerman found his awesome back.
Jim Blogs About the Content Pipeline
Yes, that comes as a surprise: Jim “Eraser” Perry, the chap that deleted your forum posts for Very Good Reasons™, returns from the Global MVP Summit 2010 just to find his I am here for the community by the community spirit refreshed and comes out of the shadows – or, in true Phoenix fashion (that’s the mythical firebird, not the city in Arizona), arising from the ashes – with the master piece of diving deeply into the XNA Game Studio content pipeline to leverage its powers to serialize your game objects into (and out of!) XML.
In more dramatic news: George W. “End of Days” Clingerman lost his awesome – investigations if a certain J. is involved in this traumatic loss have already started: If you have any knowledge about the whereabouts of poor little Georgys awesome, please report to him immediately – and became all emo.
Meanwhile, Andy “Running Man” Dunn pleas to stop bashing the XNA MVPs, Chris G. “Predator” Williams exchanges gold for bullets and tells UPS how it is, Chad “Jingle All the Way” Carter longs for a Windows Phone 7 Series, er, phone, Glenn “Total Recall” Wilson prepares for the Azure launch, Jon “The 6th Day” Watte discovers Charles Darwin, Vincente “Collateral Damage” Cartas unboxes boxy boxes and Joel “Stay Hungry” Martinez progresses nicely.