Cheesy Wotsit Challenge

I've been giving the first XNA lectures to students this week. This is actually a world first; the first time ever that XNA has been used to teach C# to first year students in Hull by a tall bloke who needs a haircut.

Anyhoo, it has gone pretty well. I had a few minutes spare at the end of the lecture so I showed the students "Hot Salad Death With Cheese". I've given them the source of the code and offered a bag of Walkers crisps as a prize for the person who produces the best game based on it. If you fancy a go you can pull the files down from here.

Black Marble XNA Followup

I said to the folk at the XNA talk last night I'd post some followup material. You can find the presentation here and the program files here.

After the talk I had a great chat with some students about the business of computer science. I said I'd make some notes in my blog about the subject, but instead I've added the material to our Where Would You Think community site. You can find my thoughts, plus links to the books that I mentioned, here.

I hate Microsoft

I had all the slides ready for my talk at TechEd 2006 in Barcelona. I'd even scheduled a presentation today so that I could preview the material to the students on our MSc course. Everything was ready. What could go wrong?

Well, what went wrong was that the Microsoft XNA team were too darned efficient for me, and released the second beta of the XNA Express yesterday. What's worse, they've fixed a bunch of issues that were irritating me and also made the Content Manager bit work so well that I just can't ignore it in the talk. I hate them all.

Because I have no intention of standing up next week and saying a whole bunch of stuff which is out of date or plain wrong it has meant that I've had to spend a big chunk of last night and this morning updating the slides and the sample code.

The good news is that the talk seemed to go OK (although I'm going to tighten it up just a bit) and that the sample game, "Hot Salad Death with Cheese" went down quite well.

Next stop Spain.

Prepare for Icon Attack!

I've been playing with the new XNA Express stuff which lets you write games using XNA. Great fun. I'm presently creating a little 2D shooting game which is provisionally titled "Icon Attack", where you fly "My Computer" into battle against massed hordes of Windows Icons, running in fear from the "Recycle Bin of Doom".

I've just got the first bit working, which is the moving icon starfield that will provide the backdrop. I'll keep you posted (quite literally) about how the development goes. Eventually I'll put the source up for you to marvel at.....

I suppose I'd better tell everyone

Every now and then you get a juicy bit of news which is of great advantage to those hearing of it. I've just got one of these and the urge to be a nice person and share it has got the better of me. If you are into teaching and computer science and stuff (and therefore in kind of competition with us at Hull I guess) you really should go and have a look here.

I reckon that it is a wonderful development that any computer science department should grab with both hands and run with.  We are soooo going to try and do just that...