One of the more recent "Hanselminutes" Podcasts (by Scott Hanselman) discusses Developing Indie Games for Xbox 360 and XNA with George Clingerman. The podcast has some simple, but surprisingly good points to make if you're going to use XNA for PC and/or Xbox 360 game development.

George mentions the success of James Silva's XNA Indie game I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1NIT!!!1, and Scott asks George why the game is only available on the Xbox 360. George says the reason why you don't see a lot of XNA games released on PC is because there's no app market on the PC. He goes on to say that there's more overhead for indies to set up a site to handle purchases for their game and handle providing the installation of the XNA framework redistributable if users don't already have it, which is understandable. The obvious problem is if you can't drive traffic to your site, you won't see enough sales to warrent the extra time and effort of handling it yourself.

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ASP.NET MVC 3 has officially been released and there's at least one big reason why you should care. It comes with Razor, a new view engine that greatly reduces the amount of typing and clutter that can be created from the existing ASPX view engine.

A quick syntax comparison:

ASPX view engine:

<h1>Hello <%=name %>, the year is <%=DateTime.Now.Year %></h1>

Razor view engine:

<h1>Hello @name, the year is @DateTime.Now.Year</h1>

Yes, it's as simple as just using an @ symbol to specify inline code. I won't go into further details, as Scott Guthrie has an excellent introduction to Razor that shows many more examples of how to use Razor. Even more links to Razor and ASP.NET MVC 3 resources can be found in Scott Guthrie's release announcment of ASP.NET MVC 3.

So now you have a good reason to upgrade your MVC 2 projects to MVC 3. There's now even official documentation on how to upgrade to MVC 3. Happy coding.

Wow, it's been a while. This year flew by. I'm already thinking about my New Year's resolution. I need to do some upgrades to this blog though before I do anything.

I currently have no way to log in and add/edit blog posts, which is one reason you haven't seen many posts from me. It's a pain to remote into the server and do manual inserts/updates into SQL. I also might change the look of the site a little bit, but we'll see. I don't want to concentrate too much on the site right now... Just make it more accessable for posting/editing, so I'll post more often. Perhaps I'll create a quick mobile version of the site as well.

So once that's done... getting back to my New Year's resolution... I've been asking myself quite often about what I want to accomplish in life. Sometimes I get overwhelmed by all the things I want to accomplish and I end up working only a little bit on each of too many projects at once; Pretty soon, I get burned out or lose interest and move to something else. That has to stop. So what are the most important things I want to accomplish?

1. Learning Korean so I can communicate better with my wife's side of the family.
2. Creating an indie game for PC/360, and get more integrated into the gamedev scene.
3. Lose some weight and get back in shape.

I'm trying to do at least one hour a day of Korean and Gamedev, and at least 10 to 15 minutes a day of working out, while still having some occasional time for gaming. As soon as I get the changes done to the blog, I should be posting more often.

My wife and I have been great. It's been a wonderful year. Earlier in the year, we went on vacation to New Mexico, and for Thanksgiving we took the Amtrak from Kansas City to Ann Arbor (it had it's moments, but we both agree that we'll never do that again; we'd rather fly).

I've been doing quite a lot of gaming lately. Finally played all the way through Final Fantasy XII (although I still have some of the marks and elite bosses to kill, which I may eventually come back to). I got a PS3 just within the last few weeks, and I've been playing Final Fantasy XIII, 3D Dot Game Heroes, Disgaea 3 and Demon's Souls (all fantastic games). Demon's Souls is what I'm currently playing the most. It's a challenging, dark fantasy game very much like Kings Field for the PS1, which I also loved and which was also developed by From Software.

Anyway, here's to learning something new, and sticking to the plan.. Happy New Year!

If you're one of the fortunate that has access to Visual Studio 2008 Professional editions or above, you might be asking, "Why would you want to use NUnit with Visual Studio 2008 Standard?". The answer is, the Standard edition (as well as Express editions) don't come integrated with a unit testing framework, nor do they come with unit testing project templates for ASP.NET MVC like the Professional edition and above. Unit testing has become more popular lately, especially with the advantages it adds for ASP.NET MVC.

However, if you're like me and can't afford the more pricey editions, there are some third party unit testing frameworks you can still use. NUnit is not your only choice, but is one of the more common frameworks and is the one I use, so I'll tell you how to get it working within Visual Studio 2008 Standard (or Visual Web Developer Express) along with debugging support while running your unit tests in ASP.NET MVC projects.

Hit the jump to see how to integrate NUnit

It's been two years since my wife Anna and I moved to Overland Park, Kansas and we've been enjoying life here. We've had one of the nicer (and more expensive) views from the balcony of our apartment that you could possibly get in this area and I thought I'd share some of these views with you before we move to a cheaper and far less scenic place. Enjoy.Taken March 28th 2009. We knew from the forecast that we were going to get snow, but waking up to it was still a shock this time of year. It all melted the next day. Typical Midwest weather! Funny thing is you can see the fountain running in the center of the pond.Taken April 4th 2009. We've seen some very amazing sunsets from this apartment. The view will be missed.More photos of the same sunset.

If you're like me, you like to use the "prop" snippet from Visual Studio 2005. If you don't know what I'm talking about, with a C# file open in Visual Studio 2005 (or 2008), type: prop then hit tab twice. In 2005, you are able to initialize the variable like so:

private string _name = "default"; public string Name { get { return _name; } set { _name = value; } }

However, in Visual Studio 2008, prop tab tab gives you the following..

public string Name { get; set; }

This is a problem because there's no simple quick way to initialize the variable.
Your only option is to initialize it in a constructor.

The way that 2005 handled it still works in 2008, so the easiest solution is to use the "prop" snippet from 2005 in 2008. So I have created a propx snippet to handle just that. Simply unzip and put the propx.snippet file into your My Code Snippets folder (in Windows 7 this is located at C:\Users\Gordon\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets\), restart visual studio then type propx tab tab to use it.

Update: Visual Studio 2010 now includes a "propfull" snippet, which does the same thing as 2005's "prop" snippet, so there's no need for using my "propx" snippet in 2010.

In my quest to find a great text/code editor for Mac OS-X, so far, I've chosen Smultron. It has a nice set of features for what I need: It supports Unicode, can display East Asian characters just fine, has project support, syntax highlighting, auto-complete and more, and it's free. Most importantly, it also has support to configure and run shell commands, which means you can use other apps to modify the text. One thing I found missing right off the bat was the ability to format, tabify, and indent XML, so it's time to find a command to format XML and integrate it with Smultron.

Read more to find out how to format XML in Smultron

I needed to write a Windows Service using Visual Studio 2005 Standard at home, however when I went to New Project, I was missing the Windows Service project template. Ok, weird. So a quick web search and I found a post with similar instructions on how to restore the Windows Service project templates.

Basically what it says is, you need to download the Windows Service template zip files:
C# Windows Service Template
VB Windows Service Template
(Hosted at megaupload.com)

Hit the jump to see the remaining instructions on how to restore the Windows Service templates.

A few things have changed since my previous Desktop Feng Shui.

My older Viewsonic LCD no longer works, so I ended up getting an HP w2207h LCD. In fact, BOTH of my Viewsonic LCDs no longer work, so my wife had to revert back to using her smaller, older Samsung SyncMaster 730B LCD. (She didn't want to get a newer LCD.)

I really like the HP w2207h, esp because my wife was able to find it for about $160. It only comes with VGA and HDMI inputs (no DVI), so some people might think that's a big drawback, but it doesn't matter to me. My cousin is about to visit from Georgia, and we do a lot of video gaming, so I will use my LCD to hook the 360 up via HDMI, so we have the option of playing on two systems simultaneously (sometimes we will play our own games at the same time, other times we'll play multiplayer games together). Anyway, for $160, it's practically a steal. Furthermore the HP can rotate into portrait mode, which I like to use a lot.

Hit the jump to see the latest Desktop Feng Shui.