The next step of Dovization

You have pobably seen the cool but old Dove film on how people were transformed from "ordinary people" into "super models" for use in a commercial. Pretty cool stuff. But this video shows promise of taking that to a whole new level. This will probably make Gibsons virtual actors come true sooner than we think.

Randomness of Random

Stumbled on this post on random numbers in games, and found it cool. It used to irritate me to the point of lying awake that my random numbers just weren't that - that was back in the old Speccy days. But now, knowing the pain randomness brings to TDD, I am entirely happy with the fact that random numbers (like friendly fire) aren't.

BTW, while you are at it, post some songs wishes for Rock Band. I am so looking forward to this game. It will take my Guitar Hero addiction to a whole new level probably. Last major GH thing - 5 stars on YYZ (Medium). Didn't thik I'd get it when the song was over, but it cam home by a small margin. The question is if I can get those 3 stars on Woman (Hard) BEFORE I 5 star every song on medium...

Microblogging

So, at Reboot this year I learned that microblogging is the new, new thing. Since Twitter does not have an SMS interface near DK, I am into Jaiku. So you can join me here.

Back to strongarming, eh?

I have been following the Cansdale vs. Microsoft case for a while. And Jamies post today did it for me. The way Microsoft is acting here disgusts me. He has been pouring hours into making an awesome add-on for their product, which is helping both professional and the open community in deveopling better products. And they are strongarming him on vague grounds because their product is not as "flawed" as they claim.

A signal is sent to the entire open source/add-on community that spending your time supporting their product is a bad idea. Just another brick in the yellow brick road that could lead "alpha geeks" away from MS - as have been the community buzz for a while now.

Well this has done it for me as well. I installed SharpDevelop and will be working with that from now on. The new version is actually awesome, i just need to find out how to enable a shortcut for run tests, as this is the way I work with TestDriven.NET today... It doesn't seem to work. Oh, and I have to figure out how to make XNA projects with SharpDevelop as well - then it is a total bye bye.

Maybe Jamie could be convinced to make TestDriven.NET's features in SharpDevelop instead. Their TDD tools are not that good. :o)

 

Anti-Patterns for TDD

Stubled across this excellent article on anti-patterns, or code smells if you like, for test driven development. I actually find it quite good because I have often found it difficult in TDD to explain to people what to do. Perhaps it is easier to explain what not to do.... Anyways, I reckognize many of the smells from my early TDD experiences.

 

Playing with WatiN

I just discovered WatiN yesterday. I have been using Watir for some time now, but it has bugged me that the integration with Visual Studio was not very good. Especially the combination of using TestDriven.NET with Watir is not good. Hopefully WatiN will fix all that.

So in the process of trying to set up a controlled environment for WatiN to execute in, I stubled upon this great post by RobertMcLaws. When using Watir I have been irritated by the fact that the WebDev server within VS will start up on different ports whenever it bloody well feels like it! There is a rational explanation for the port change of course. But nevertheless it has required that I set up my IIS for using Watir. And that bugged me. Now things will probably get easier.

I will be posting more on WatiN as soon as I have played with it some more.

Kick Roberts story at DotNetKicks:

Infidelity and XNA

I'll start out by posting this unnessecary link to a good post on agile. Unnessecary becouase I got it from Joel, so evereybodys read it already. Nevertheless, I'll post it here for future reference. I think it is is a worthwile read.

Word around town is that I have been cheating on my blog. Unfaithful if you want. And that is all true. Yeah, I'll confess. I have started another Blog. In contrast to this blog, it is in Danish, and concentrated more on me and my personal life. "But you have been doing that here as well?". Yup. But that sort of takes the focus from this Blog. I would like to use this one more for tech related stuff... Work related. And not having to write a long post on what I am up to each time (see, you're doing it again!). And I think that is why I have a standstill in Blogging. Maybe.


All right: Game Development is the name of the game. Gosuman is up and running and I now get Game Development gigs. Cool. I will try to focus on doing the stuff with XNA, because XNA uses C# and that rocks. And because I can make stuff for my XBox 360. Right now I am learning and taking a course at ITU where we are making an FPS game with XNA. We want to focus on doing good AI, but since we're making it from the bottom up, we need to do all the plumbing as well. I have posted a screenshot. And maybe I will post a playable demo at some point. We'll see.