John Lamansky

From a PCWorld article:

A new game development platform from Microsoft allows anyone to create games for its Xbox 360 console, the company said today [August 14].

Typically, console games are designed by large studios that must pay high prices to buy development kits in order to write games for consoles. Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio Express is a new development kit that will be released in beta form in August. It will be available for free to anyone using a Windows XP PC. The kit is designed for game developer novices as well as studios, Microsoft said.

[…]

The XNA Game Studio Express development environment is based on Visual Studio Express and .NET, and allows developers to create games simultaneously for Xbox 360 and Windows XP.

Microsoft expects the final non-beta version of the development platform to become available by the end of the year. Another version of XNA Game Studio Express designed for professional game developers will become available in early 2007, the company said.

The part about simultaneous Xbox/Windows development sounds pretty cool. It’ll be interesting to see whether this platform takes off with game developers.

Who knew you could make games with Visual Studio? MSDN’s Coding4Fun site has an entire section devoted to Game Development!

Until I saw this, I was under the impression that game development could only be achieved using C++ or a “beginning game programmer language” such as Dark Basic.

Looks like I was wrong! If I decide to get into computer game development again, I’ll definitely consider using Visual Basic or Visual C# as a balance between the power of C++ and the ease of use of Dark Basic.

According to a blog post on MSDN, Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition will be free permanently!

From the blog post:

We are incredibly excited to announce that effective April 19th, 2006, all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions including Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual J#, Visual C++, and Visual Web Developer Express will be free permanently!

Prior to this pricing announcement, Visual Studio Express Editions were promotionally discounted to be free for one year, starting on November 7th, 2005. With this announcement, the promotional discount for Visual Studio Express is now permanent and Express will continue to be free.

The key reason for the pricing change was you. You’ve helped make Visual Studio Express a runaway hit, and we’re proud to announce that in the five months since its launch, Express has been downloaded over 5 million times!

Developers using Visual Studio 2005, especially those switching from Visual Studio .NET, will probably know that Visual Studio 2005 hides code produced in Design mode automatically. Although on Microsoft’s site this feature is called “Just My Code,” there is no reference to that phrase anywhere in the UI that I could tell.

I couldn’t find a solution on the Internet that worked, and I finally figured it out on my own. I thought I’d publish it here in case anyone else had the same problem. It’s really simple: just click View, then click Show All Files. In the Solution Explorer pane, a plus sign will appear next to Windows forms. Just click on the plus sign, then double-click on <formname>.Designer.vb (replacing <formname> with the form name, of course).

(FYI: Note that I found conflicting instructions on the Internet that said the option to disable Just My Code was in the Options dialog box. Perhaps that was only applicable to beta versions of Visual Studio 2005, or perhaps my solution only works with the Express Editions.)