Dan Fernandez's Blog

Congrats to the Popfly team for moving Popfly Game Creator from alpha to Beta and adding a bunch of handy features. For the full rundown, check out the Popfly Team Blog. 

Here's a few of my favorite features

Inserting images into a game

• Alpha (before): You had to manually build XAML and manually upload images for an actor and make sure the URL is
• Beta (after): Native support for adding images to an actor

Playing Audio

• Alpha (before): Popfly let you play built-in sounds with no code, but if you wanted to play a custom sound clip required custom JavaScript code
• Beta (after): No code to play custom sounds

Testing Different Scenes

• Alpha (before): You had to manually play the game to get a scene or add a custom keyboard shortcut to load a scene
• Beta (after): Built-in support for previewing any scene

Customizable actor collisions

• Alpha (before): Your actor "hit box" (the area for actor collisions) was either a square or a circle and you could *not* make it smaller
• Beta (after): You can drag and drop the hit box and make it larger or smaller

All-in-all, lots of good, meaty features for Game Creators.

Scott Hanselman recently blogged about "Ninjas on fire" as a way to describe being overwhelmed at work, here's a snippet from his post on the origin:

Jesse asked me how I was doing yesterday and I replied "Ninjas on fire, man." Four years ago when Halo 2 was coming out it was described like this.

"Halo 2 is alot like Halo 1, except it's Halo 1 on fire going 120 miles per hour through a hospital zone chased by helicopters and ninjas. And the ninjas are all on fire too." -Jason Jones

For me and some of my compatriots, it also become a phrase that referred to our current workload, like:

"How's work?"

"I'm being chased by ninjas."

"Are they on fire?"

"Not yet."

"Oh, so it's Tuesday. You wait."

The short-hand just became "ninjas on fire, man" as a response to when you're totally overwhelmed with deadlines and work.

Scott and I taped This Week on Channel 9 earlier to day and I was telling him how our old team came up with a similar version of "Ninjas on Fire" as we just had *so* many projects to be working on and so little time that we continually had too many things to handle. To illustrate the overworked advisory system, I've added this helpful graphic which is of course ripped off from the US Government's Homeland Security System.

My current level is:

And no, you don't get to know how the criteria is set :)

For World of Warcraft developers looking to build AddOns, a BETA version of AddOn Studio is now available! Here's an interview and demo with Attila Kisko and Gabor Ratky on AddOn Studio.

 There are some bugs and some content that still isn't available, but we're working on it :)

 All of it is made possible of course by the power of the Visual Studio Shell

Hey folks, if you've built some cool project, the Non-Pro team wants to hear from you! Send them an email!

Kudos to the Popfly team for adding new features in their July update. My favorite features are the pre-loading of assets which will pre-load images, audio, video before a game starts so it doesn't lag out and the High Score service. The full list of features can be found on the Popfly Team blog.

Crayon Cannon

If you haven't played this game, stop what you're doing and give it a try. It reminds me of Crayon Physics Deluxe in its simplicity and addictiveness.

Play Now

Woohoo! From Joystiq, Bioware has officially spilled the beans that they are building a MMO based on the Knights of the Old Republic game. The first KOTOR game was amazing, clearly one of the best Xbox games ever and an amazing twist at the end...in short, a masterpiece.

Hotness!

 Here are the notes from the Future of MMO's panel in February at GDC that included Ray Muyzka from Bioware

Yes, it's Bill's last day, here's a collection of videos for your viewing pleasure:

• Channel 9: Bill Gates: Transitioning into the Future
• Channel 9: This Week on Channel 9 with Jeff Sandquist and Bill Gates stories
• Channel 9: 'Softies share their Bill Gates stories
• MS PressPass: Bill Gates Looking Backing, Moving Ahead
• CNN: Bill Gates Slideshow narrated by Bill Gates
• MSNBC: Tom Brokaw interview with Bill Gates

You should also check out the Bill Gates Retirement Party on Gizmodo and Bill Gates Day on Engadget

There was a company meeting today at 9am to say goodbye to Bill with Bill and Steve. MSNBC wrote an article on the meeting, here's a quick snippet:

On his final full day at Microsoft Corp., Bill Gates went on stage to reminisce with his longtime friend Steve Ballmer, and neither man could hold back tears as Ballmer handed Gates a large scrapbook as a farewell present.

...

..He was introduced to fellow freshman Ballmer by a mutual friend. On their first date, they went to the movies to see an unlikely back-to-back showing of "Singing in the Rain" and "A Clockwork Orange."

Ballmer, who has famously danced and jumped around stage at conferences, described a similarly silly and uninhibited Gates that evening.

"So we come back from the movie, we're kind of dancing, we're both kind of playing Gene Kelly, and some guy wrestles me to the ground in our dorm," Ballmer said. It fell to Gates, who hardly qualifies as burly, to fend off the fellow student.

Bill, you will be missed :(

Margaret Rouse from the Overheard blog calls me out for dying my hair blonde:

I’m a big Dan Fernandez fan — but I had a hard time watching this video because I kept thinking “why did you bleach your hair?”

Now Margaret has nice things to say about me (thank you!), but I was a bit taken back because I never thought my hair was a distraction. I will say I have more fun being blonde (yes the rumors are true) and oddly enough, I eat healthier in some unexplained subconscious need to keep up with appearances while I'm blonde.

What do you all think?

Brunette	Blonde

In case you haven't heard, this week is BillG's last week as a full-time Microsoft employee as he transitions to working full-time at his foundation. Sure, he'll still be the Chairman of the board and there are some projects that he will work with directly, but it is still a bit weird to think about Microsoft without Bill Gates.

In this 30 minute Channel 9 interview with Charles Torre, you'll hear Bill talk about his transition, Ray Ozzie, competing against Google, improving Microsoft's agility, what's going to be important for our platform in the next decade and of course Bill's role at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Adam Nathan recently blogged about some of the new features they've added to Popfly Game Creator including the color swapper for skinning actors, guidelines and snapping for aligning characters, actor stamping for easier tiling, new events, and the ability to clone a level!

All-in-all, this should make building games using Popfly even easier.

Check out Adam's post for the full details.

At TechEd this year, I gave what can only be described as an overly ambitious talk given I only had 45 minutes:

Coding4Fun: The Secrets to Programming YouTube, iTunes, Microsoft Zune, Windows Vista Peer-to-Peer APIs, and Even World of Warcraft

I say overly ambitious as YouTube, Vista P2P, and Warcraft could easily have been dedicated 75 minute sessions so covering all of them enough to be meaningful in 45 minutes was....a challenge. As promised, here's a quick recap of my slides and code. The full slide deck can be found here, and thanks everyone for showing up!

iTunes

• Demo project shows using the iTunes COM library to play, pause, move backwards and forwards through tracks, and how to search your iTunes music collection
• Download: Code in VB and C#

Peer-to-Peer using the Coding4Fun P2P Toolkit

World of Warcraft

• The first WOW demo, WriteData, showed how .NET applications can share information with a Lua AddOn by updating an AddOns files or its saved variables. It effectively uses an AddOn's saved variables as a "communication bridge" that a .NET application can read or write to. The challenge here is that if you make a change to the saved variables, they will not be picked up by Warcraft until you reload the UI so it isn't an "instant" communication bridge.
• The second WOW demo was where I showed AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft, which is a sweet (if I may say so myself) example of what you can do with the Visual Studio Shell to build a custom IDE for *anything*, including World of Warcraft. In the demo (you can see almost the same demo given at TechEd Europe), I show how to capture the PLAYER_TARGET_CHANGED and COMBAT_LOG_EVENT_UNFILTERED (the new 2.4 combat log) events. If the target changed, the code examines the level of the target and changes a Texture based on whether it's a lower, same, or higher level than me. For the combat log events, If there are multiple kill events within 15 seconds, it'll play some Halo audio clips.
• Download: AddOn Studio sample projects

Resources

• InnerTube Demo – Coming Soon!
• iTunes COM SDK (Library ships with iTunes)
• Zune DB API (ships with Zune), tutorial available here
• ffmpeg - The Swiss army knife of media format conversion 
• YouTube API
• Coding4Fun P2P Toolkit
• AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft
• Halo Game sounds
• World of Warcraft Programming Book
• Channel 9 
• Coding4Fun Book – Coming Soon, Pre-order now!
• Coding4Fun Site

As I blogged about on Channel 9 earlier (I love that we can have text *and* video posts now), SQL Server 2008 RC0 is now available for download.

On the download page, you may have noticed that there are two versions of SQL Server Express

1. SQL Server 2008 Express
2. SQL Server 2008 Express with Advanced Services

While the SQL Server 2008 Editions page doesn't list the "Advanced Services" Express Edition, luckily Mike Wachal from the SQL Server Express team posted a detailed breakdown of the differences on the SQL Server Express blog.

The key features that are in Advanced Services that you won't get with regular Express are:

• PowerShell integration by default
• Synchronization Services installed by default

As well as a number of Reporting Services features

• Ability to increase Reporting Services Memory Limit
• Reporting Services Word/Rich Text Export
• IIS Agnostic Report Deployment
• Enhanced Gauges and Charting

It also appears that the regular SQL Server Express also supports installing the 32-bit version on a x64 platform (using WoW), but as both Express versions including 32-bit and 64-bit native installations, I'm not sure why you would want to install the 32-bit version on x64.

What hasn't changed

The physical limitations for SQL Server haven't changed between 2005 and 2008 (1 CPU, 1GB Memory, 4GB of user data per database), but the nice thing is that SQL Server Express will take advantage of multiple cores on a single CPU.

Ariel interviews Jeff Sandquist, my manager on scary VPs and the dfiference between evangelists and apologists.

Best quote:

"When I first started here, I was terrified of the higher ups. They were almost like Santa Claus — these mythical figures running these billion dollar businesses."

I recently posted a high-level feature specification for version 2.0 of AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft on the projects Wiki which you can check out here.

Note: If you're new to Warcraft programming or are interested in getting started, I highly recommend getting World of Warcraft Programming: A Guide and Reference for Creating WoW Addons (Wiley Page) my full 5/5 star review is here.

Better yet, Gabor Ratky sent me some sneak peek screenshots of the new features in builds and it's very cool stuff.  Below is just a quick sampling and is not the full list of features and the vast majority are based directly on feedback from the project's Issue Tracker (the full list has been copy/pasted at the bottom of this email).

Import from WowAce repository

Be able to instantly open and import any of the 600+ WowAce AddOns without having to manually save files to disc and then build a custom project. The vast majority of this work is possible because of the reuse of AnkhSVN.

Table of Contents (TOC) File structure support

v1 of AddOn Studio automagically build the TOC file for you, but in some cases, this was a bad thing as developers need control of the order of files in the TOC or what files to include/exclude. Version 2 adds the ability to easily and graphically modify the TOC file order and files.

Dramatically improved support for WYSIWYG

Version 2.0 makes a big step forward in WYSIWYG support by adding much deeper support for BLP and Blizzard textures. In fact, one of the key things the team is doing is testing the built-in Blizzard frames to see how well they render directly in the designer. While I don't know if this will ever be perfect, it's remarkable how close it can get.

Graphical/GUI testing with WowBench

One of the difficulties in testing AddOns is that you have to fully exit and reload Warcraft for every single change. This can be both tedious and time-consuming. WowBench is an open source project that enables you to simulate events in Warcraft, it's basically a big mock object.  Let's say you want to simulate what happens when a player changes his target. You can use WowBench to fake firing the target changed event and see what your code does from there. The next version of AddOn Studio integrates WowBench directly into the IDE (instead of via command line) so you can run commands directly against the world and addon as well. This will be a "must-have" feature for debugging and testing addons.

Loading the world

Debugging the Outfitter AddOn

Again all of this is subject to change and there are also several more features being added in the future.

Here's the full list of work items addressed in version 2.0

• Work Item: Add: Import Existing AddOn
• Work Item: Add: Add Subversion check-in/check-out Window
• Work Item: Add: Improve the auto-generated TOC experience/check-out Window
• Work Item: Add designer support for different frames
• Work Item: Designer support for texture browsing
• Work Item: Add WYSIWYG for different fontstring sizes
• Work Item: Designer should not replace XML
• Work Item: Renaming Frame.xml file does not rename <script> tag
• Work Item: AddOn Studio not rendering Blizzard FrameXML files
• Work Item: Add GUI for WowBench function emulator
• Work Item: Add Immediate Window for lua functions
• Work Item: IntelliSense support missing for Lua functions
• Work Item: Add IntelliSense support for Wow Globals
• Work Item: IntelliSense doesn't show up for locals or custom functions
• Work Item: IntelliSense shows local declarations out of their scope

I just finished reading Mary Jo Foley's new (unauthorized) book, Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post Gates-Era.

Amusing Part #1 came for me when I read the forward which was written by Mini-Microsoft, in Mary Jo's words, Microsoft's most (in)famous internal blogger.

It's an entertaining read for me personally for a couple of reasons, like the fact that friends, colleagues, and other cool projects at Microsoft are mentioned (including me which was a complete surprise), and because Mary Jo has a much broader view of all of Microsoft than so many of us have and it's fascinating to hear Mary Jo's balanced views on what she thinks is in store for the future of Microsoft.

I'll post a more detailed review some time later, but as other folks might find this interesting, here's the list of current and former 'softies mentioned in the book in alphabetical order by first name:

1. Abolade Gbadegesin
2. Adam Barr
3. Alexander Gounares
4. Amitabh Srivastava
5. Bill Buxton
6. Bill Gates
7. Bill Hilf
8. Bill Veghte
9. Bob Muglia
10. Brad Goldberg
11. Brad Silverberg
12. Brian Arbogast
13. Brian McAndrews
14. Chris Jones
15. Cori Hartje
16. Craig Mundie
17. Dan Fernandez
18. Dan Kasun
19. Dare Obasanjo
20. Dave Cutler
21. David Treadwell
22. David Vaskevitch
23. Don Ferguson
24. Don Mattrick
25. Eric Rudder
26. Grant George
27. Horacio Gutierrez
28. Iain McDonald
29. J Allard
30. J.D. Meier
31. James Hamilton
32. Jason Zions
33. Jim Allchin
34. Jon DeVaan
35. Jon Rosenberg
36. Julie Larson-Green
37. Kathleen Hogan
38. Kevin Johnson
39. Kevin Turner
40. Kurt DelBene
41. Lewis Levin
42. Lili Cheng
43. Mark Lucovsky
44. Marshall Phelps
45. Martin Taylor
46. Mike Sievert
47. Mike Walker
48. Mini-Microsoft
49. Pat Helland
50. Randy Granovetter
51. Ray Ozzie
52. Robbie Bach
53. Robert Herbold
54. Robert Scoble
55. Sam Ramji
56. Satya Nadella
57. Scott Di Valerio
58. Scott Guthrie
59. Soma Somasegar
60. Stephen Chapman
61. Stephen Elop
62. Steve Ballmer
63. Steve Berkowitz
64. Steve Guggenheimer
65. Steve Liffick
66. Steven Sinofsky
67. Tami Reller
68. Ted Kummert
69. Tom Gibbons
70. Yusuf Medhi

Biggest shocks that weren't named in the book in some capacity

• Lisa Brummel, Christopher Liddell, Paul Flessner, and Anders Hejlsberg

* Updated 5/6 to add Adam Barr who's blog was listed in the appendix on Mary Jo's short list