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 Danger Zone.

Enter Matt “Gone Native” Pettineo.

Matt. Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time with the various performance and debugging utilities available for Direct3D, and I thought it might be useful to give a quick overview of what’s out there.  I’m sure most people who do a lot of Direct3D/XNA work are aware of these tools, but probably aren’t familiar with all of the really cool things you can do with them.

List the tools to cover.

Start with PIX.

Matt. So at this point just everybody knows about knows about PIX. I mean it comes with the DirectX SDK, for crying out loud.  This handy little program started its like as the Performance Investigator for Xbox (original Xbox, that is) and today is useful performance and debugging tool for both Windows and the Xbox 360. […]

If you’re an XNA programmer I’d recommend checking out my in-depth PIX With XNA article, especially if you’re new to D3D in general. For rest of you, here’s a summary of what I think are the most useful things you can do with PIX:

Get to the metal.

Exeunt.

SCENE XXVI

The VentSpace once again.

Enter Promit “Gone Shoveling” Roy.

Promit. I’m currently working towards the release of SlimTune 0.2.1, which will hopefully happen before GDC. If you’ve been paying attention, that might seem a bit odd to you — 0.2.0 isn’t out yet. That’s because 0.2.0 is the pre-release version, and I need testers for it.

More the details and contact.

Exit.

The blog formerly know known as MJP’s XNA Danger Zone.

Enter Matt “Danger Mouse” Pettino.

Matt. I got tired having an awkward mouthful of a blog name, so I decided to shorten it to something much snappier.  Hence “MJP’s XNA Danger Zone” becomes simply “The Danger Zone”. I like it better already.

Share plans for the future. Exit.

SCENE XVIII

Twitter.

Enter Chris G. “Danger Tape” Williams.

Chris. @ninjaharlot guess you hate me then… cuz I think it's [Two and a Half Men] hilarious.

Chris. @TehGrumpyDude this cinches it… I need a Two and a Half Men tshirt to wear to the summit.

Chris. @ninjaharlot I have no doubt we will. It may involve a chair, a tv and some duct tape though… just sayin.

Enter George W. “Danger Poo” Clingerman.

George. Ugh stomach so sick from all the food I've eaten watching this superbowl game. The blue team looks good, but the gold team is doing well too

Pause.

George. @ninjaharlot I agree with that. I now want to destroy the planet! [Hack the planet! Hack the planet!]

Exeunt.

Chris. Bazinga!

Exeunt.