Here are some notes on the process:

• The upgrade itself took some time (4-6 hours), and apart from one of the pre-conditions being the uninstalallation of Windows Powershell, it went smoothly;
• Windows Live Writer lost the preview themes, which I had to re-download/update;
• The apps I had pinned to the start menu are gone, as well as the Quick Launch toolbar;
• Apps that seem to be working fine: FeedDemon 2.7, Simp Pro, Colligo Contributor 3.2 Pro, Twhirl, Firefox 3, Word/Excel/PowerPoint, SnagIt, Zune Software, Mesh;
• The Zune Software starts when I plug in the Zune in the USB, but it doesn’t sync. The Zune forums helped: just run the Zune app “as an Administrator”;
• The upgrade process did a strange change to my files: it moved them from C:\Users\jota.CREATE to C:\Users\jota. As you can guess, this caused several problems, with Outlook 2007, Zune, Mesh, and others. Mesh especially was especially troublesome, because it started sync’ing files back to the original location, thus doubling the files. I had to manually move the folders, one by one, and this was not a good experience.
• VMWare Workstation 6.5 worked fine, if ran as an administrator.

Overal, I must say this has been a great experience until now. Things work correctly, no major issues (I do have occasional intermittent wireless network losses, but I can’t pin it down yet to Win7), it doesn’t look like a beta. The only thing I don’t really like is the default display in Windows Explorer. I much prefered it to open in the My Documents folder, not the library list. I’m pleased, anyway.

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Last night, local Microsoft organized an XNA Game Night, where 6 teams showed off some of their game dev skills. Most of the games were simple (with 2 exceptions), some of the PC and some for the Xbox360 (none for the Zune!), most of them Arcade-like games, but it was apparent that XNA is a very interesting platform for game development, and it’s very easy to get caught up and seduced by ideas and start thinking about giving it a try. Guess what I’m downloading… 🙂

Anyway, if anyone is interested, some starting points are the following:

Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP

XNA Creators Club

XNA Developer Center (@MSDN)

The post XNA Game Night appeared first on Blog IT.

What I really enjoy about this setup, apart from the games,  is the totally integrated experience I have between three devices: the xbox, the windows vista laptop, and the Zune. I can connect the Zune to the Xbox or the Pc, I can play contents on the Xbox from the PC or the Zune (or the Zune via the PC, even), everything just works. Certainly far from sci-fi stuff, but a great experience nevertheless.

Back to games, one other thing I also think is interesting is the Xbox Live stuff. I’d heard about it from SaaS/S+S presentations, but the reality is that this ends up being a very important part of the whole gaming on the xbox experience. You can have a friend’s list, message other players, chat, see their profiles, have video conversations, download (and upload) contents – and these are blazing fast… probably distributing stuff using some Akamai pipe.

In my previous post I mentioned that the XNA games will run on the Zune (see this post). I’m not a player of arcade-like games, but this is certainly an interesting development. Again, games for the PC will run on the XBox and the Zune. What is still missing from the Xbox is more social/community content, especially in terms of games. I’d like to see the Xbox Live Arcade feature community-developed games. This was actually announced at GDC2008, so hopefully it won’t be long.

What is really missing from the XBox is an Internet Browser. Maybe this is for security reasons, but solving those would be the right answer, not leaving the feature out.

LokiJota

PS: Ebay UK is a great place to buy games, given their price in stores.

The post The Xbox360 appeared first on Blog IT.