MIX UK

Earlier in the week I was at MIX UK. It was an interesting two days with the highlights being sessions from Scott Guthrie on Silvernight and ASP 3.5 and Danny Thorpe and Angus Logan talking about Windows Live Services.

The sneak peeks at the end were fun with the best contribution coming from Simon Peyton Jones of Microsoft Research, on Software Transactional Memory.

All in all it was a great event, as I had access to the latest technical offerings from Microsoft, good hospitality, and much free swag! The swag included a t-shirt, 1Gb memory stick, bamboo recorder (don't ask!), and full retail versions of Windows Vista Ultimate (RRP £370), and Expression Studio (RRP £399). Not bad for the £200 registration fee!

Office 2007

Students can buy Office 2007 for £38.95. The background details are here. To buy it visit http://www.theultimatesteal.co.uk/

XNA

Ed has written an article on how to get started with XNA. Check it out.

XNA 2

Microsoft have announced the release of XNA Game Studio 2. The main new feature I'm glad to see is that it will work with any version of Visual Studio 2005. No more having to installed VS2005 Express just to use XNA :)

For those of you who don't know what XNA is, it's a set of tools, complete with a managed runtime environment that faciliates computer game development. It's based on the .NET framework v2 and includes all kinds of specific game development class libraries in order to enable code reuse. The XNA runtime is available for Windows XP/Vista and Xbox 360, meaning that games you write (in C#) can be deployed to both Windows and Xbox 360 without any redevelopment.

Imagine Cup 08

The website for the Imagine Cup 2008 is now open for registrations. If you are interested in entering a team then come and have a chat with me.