The Mail Owl Scrolls

Windows Workflow Foundation Beta2 Quick Overview

If you didn’t understand the concept of Windows Workflow Foundation’s State Machine, the picture below they’ve released for the Beta 2 release should help (and for the rest of you, it’s a good example of a non-technical workflow).  It’s also rather cute ^--^

Paul Andrew has made a Change Document available from his blog for us to see the changes from Beta1 to Beta2 (Read more on his blog).

It looks like there’s been quite a lot done, but after skimming through the document the main changes sticking to naming conventions (For example all activities names except for ConditionedActivityGroup have been suffixed with “Activity”; so the Code activity is now called CodeActivity) and refactoring (workflow activities had “special parameters” which has been removed.  The base in-parameters are the workflow’s public settable properties and the out-parameters are the workflow’s public gettable properties).

Not that there’s some new stuff as well!  There’s a new activity status Faulting (the others are: Initialized, Executing, Canceling, Compensating, Closed) which the activity enters when it throws an exception, or when it bubbles up (as they put it) from a Faulted child activity; and all the associated handlers and FaultHandler activities.  There’s also now an overload of CreateWorkflow which accepts XmlReader so you can run “no-compile” workflows.

You’re going to have to read the document or, better yet, download the WinFX January CTP (just make sure you follow the instructions correctly for uninstalling Beta1) and find out for yourself.

NAG January 2006 devLAN Conclusion

Wow! What an awesome time the NAG devLAN was.  I don’t think I’ve spent so much time with Game Maker in a single sitting and though I say it myself, I think I produced a pretty decent game to enter.

The “competition” started with arranging tables, PCs and power connections (like in most LANs) and after a short introduction and providing the theme of the day from Danny Day, we were off.

The theme was “Everything Random” and we had to demonstrate randomness in our game.

What was amazing was the silence.  Quite unlike a normal gaming LAN session there was just the sound of keyboards tapping, the buzz of power supplies and creative minds whirling away.  I had to put my headphones on just to concentrate.

I think the best part of the day was seeing everyone else’s game.  Everyone got a chance to sit at another person’s PC and play the game created on it while everyone else watched and the creator explained the controls, his idea for a game and pointed out the randomness in it.  There was a platform game, 2D shooters, a racing game, a Zork-like quest and a puzzle maze.

In the end no real winner was picked since the competition was so close.  That was a little disappointing but we were already running over time and parents were waiting in the isles.

The next step is to get to bigger and better; this includes roving assistants, organized catering (with everyone so busy on their game we never braai’d last night [what is the past tense for braai btw?]), cool prizes and lots more people.

Xbox 360 available on Take2

Head on over to Take2 and add the Xbox 360 Full System to your Wish List cause it’s being made available to South Africa for R4599 (at time of post).

I’m definitely going to get myself one of these babies along with all the Media Centre goodness.

If the Full System is a bit pricy for you there’s also the Standard Core Pack for R1000 cheaper (again, at time of post).

But don’t forget you’re going to need games with your purchase, pointless having a console with nothing to play. I’d like to recommend: Perfect Dark Zero, Need for Speed: Most Wanted and Dead or Alive 4

Windows Workflow Engine Archtecture

Yesterday was my first presentation on Windows Workflow at a whiteboard session at BB&D; and I want to share a diagram of the engine architecture for Workflow that I made (from Presenting Windows Workflow Foundation Beta Edition) for the talk.

Starting from the bottom; the Host Process is not cut off but rather because Workflow has no inherit execution process it runs as an in-process engine inside a host process.  Possible host processes on the Windows platform include: console apps, WinForms, web apps, web services, SharePoint Server and NT Serivce apps.

The Hosting layer provides a set of interfaces between Workflow and the various host processes for Persistance, Communiction, Timing, Tracking, Transactions and Threading.  Developers are also able to build their own host layer providers (for example if you want to persist data to your own custom store).

Next is the Runtime layer.  This is the core layer of Workflow and is not pluggable.  The Execution service schedules activities and supports event handling, exceptions, tracking and transactions.  The Lifecycle Management manages states that must be persisted.

The top layer is the Workflow Model layer.  This layer includes multiple workflow model types, activities and the main programming API used by developers creating workflows and custom activies.

This was a VERY brief summary of the architecture engine for Windows Workflow.  Visit the Windows Workflow Foundation website and check out the book I used as reference.

Game Maker devLAN in Pretoria

The good guys over at NAG Game.Dev are organizing a Game Maker devLAN on the 15th January 2006 in Pretoria.  This is where the participants all get together and try, individually, to write a game in a limited period of time (about 6-8 hours) against a theme revealed at the start of the competition.

Visit the forum thread and RSVP if you’d like to come along.  The times and venue are posted there.

If you haven’t already played with Game Maker yet this is your chance to learn what it’s all about and try your hand at making a game.  No previous experience is required and Danny Day will be giving an introduction to Game Maker at the start of the day.

This is also a light hearted competition; asking questions and getting tips-and-tricks are encouraged.  It’s more about an opportunity to meet the rest of the community and learning from the best than a flat out competition.

So see you there!

Hot Lab #7 - Conclusion

Last Saturday was the 7th Hot Lab and I think it went really well.  I did a talk on the Irrlicht Engine and demonstrated a few of its features and its ease of use.  I also handed out copies of Microsoft’s Visual C# Express (along with Irrlicht, some demos and presentation material).

The feedback on the talk was positive and while I thought I didn’t show enough to explain the concepts around the engine the general response was that I did a good job.  (I’m really going to have to get myself some web space as I’d like to upload my slides and demos for those of you who couldn’t make it).

But for me, the most important part of the Hot Labs is the social afterwards.  You can almost believe the conspiracy theorists that say that there’s a small group of individuals who sit around and plot of the path of humanity based on the discussions we have at the social.  We talk about the game development industry in South Africa and what can we do to grow it.

On Saturday we talked about the need for content in games and how we must engage with artists and sound engineers and get them excited about the game industry so they’ll start producing material.  I think a good idea is to approach varsities and get the art students involved.  And I’m not just talking about creating sprites for use by the developer.  There’s concept art which can spur the idea for a game; level and map designing; there’s background stories to write and all the other artwork that goes into a decent game.  In truth a game developer just creates and manipulates an engine but it’s the chassis of the car that people see and gets the engine to the finish line.

I don’t know what I’m going to do for Hot Lab #8 yet.  I got a lot of comments around possible options and even some homework with links to articles on game development and industry growth.  You’ll just have to wait and see.

Speed up the loading time of Visual Studio 2005

I got passed this link to from a friend (Thanks Michael) on how to speed up the loading time of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL 2005.

Basically, you add the argument –nosplash in the shortcut to for VS2005 and for SQL2005.  Right-click on the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 shortcut in the Start Menu and click Properties; then in the Target textbox append –nosplash at the end of the link.

If you installed Visual Studios to the default location it should look like this: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" -nosplash

Enjoy!

Monkey Island Movie

Ah, but to wish that this was true; unfortunately it’s just part of a collection of “games to movie” photo manipulated posters from Something Awful.

While Gabbahead (thanks for the link btw) thinks the movie would suck (based on the normal mess ups the movie industry makes of books and other stories this would be true), but with a good cast and a crew story writers who’ve actually played and finished the game, I don’t think it could be that bad.

I’m still waiting for someone to produce Sierra’s Space Quest series for the movies (I’ve previously suggested Owen Wilson for the role of Roger Wilco) but even Kings Quest would be cool.

Unfortunately I reckon Peasant’s Quest will be a full motion feature before Sierra releases its license.

Hot Lab #7: topic change

While it’s not good practice to change the topic of your course a week before your presentation, I feel I’m obliged to in keeping with my Hot Labs objectives and the objectives of my audience.

I can however “blame” Mariuce Kerrigan’s Effective Speaking & Presentation course that BB&D sent me on.  The course is fantastic and I can highly recommend it to everyone; especially those growing in the speaker circuit.

So the new title of this weekend’s Hot Lab is “Irrlicht Tutorials in .NET” and I’m to demonstrate some of the functionality in Irrlicht and attendees will work through the tutorials.

This means that attendees will get the chance to render Quake 3 maps and run around in them.  They’ll play with collision detection, water effects and particle systems; all in 3D.

As a special highlight, I’ll be handing out free CDs of Visual C# Express along with DirectX 9 as well as the Irrlicht SDK.