XNA Game Studio 2.0 and Visual Studio

I was excited that Microsoft had release the new XNA Game Studio 2.0, since I was looking to do some little game development. However, it only works with Visual Studio 2005 products (full or express editions) and I run Visual Studio 2008.

After getting nowhere trying to make it work, I attempted to get the free Express edition of Visual C# 2005, but of course, the download page for the Express Editions points at all the new 2008 editions. Luckily, after much digging around, I managed to find this link to Visual C# 2005 Express Edition, which others in the same position may find useful

Coding again

After a long hiatus from writing any code, I'm adding a few new features to my GTK NFO viewer, from a request on the forums. I've not looked a it in a while and now MonoDevelop crashes whenever I try to load the project.

I've having to rebuild my whole dev environment from source in order to get the latest version, cos Ubuntu's Monodevelop is woefully outdated. *Sigh*

Culinary Limbo

Was particularly annoyed in the Café at the local Sainsburys today. They stopped the breakfast menu at 11:30 and didn't offer anything from the afternoon menu until 2:30. So there's a 3 hour "limbo" period where its either a cold sandwich or a full hot lunch. No hot light snacks.

Holiday cancelled

Our trip to the Black Forest has been cancelled, as the holiday company has gone into administration :-( Luckily we're protected by ABTA, so we'll get a full refund. BBC News story about it here.

Chiptunes til I die

I'll never get tired of listening of Atari chiptunes, so I'm giving my MacBook some YM2149 love using XSC and the SNDH Archive

Windows doesn't do that?

Here we are, several generations of Microsoft's OS on and there are still things that don't come as standard (or if they do, are woefully basic) in Windows Vista (even the Ultimate edition) :-

• DVD player - this is a common thing for a media computer these days, why do we need to rely on 3rd party software for this?


• Word Processor - paying for this is so last season (and Apple are just as bad for this). Almost all modern Linux distros have this as standard


• ISO burning - because not all the discs I want to burn are from files on my HD


• SSH client - you have telnet, but who uses that these days?


• FTP client - because Windows Explorer just doesn't cut it

Feel free to add other things you think Windows should include by default in the comments....

Yahoo! updated the widget engine

Yahoo! Widget Engine has finally been updated to work on Leopard. Now I can waste screen space on little floating wotnots again :-)