Section: Blogs

Xbox Dad article on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is up

Aug 14, 2007 1 min.

I was a bit surprised to find that I enjoyed this game, although I enjoyed the last few books in the series and the latest movie, I really figured the game would only appeal to kids. The pace is slower than most adult/teen games, but that makes it into more of an exploration instead of just quickly moving from one task to the next. My wife watched it and thought it was similar to a much more interactive and complex form of the game Myst… there are some action elements where you have to move quickly, target the bad guys, etc… but for the most part you are figuring out puzzles, perfecting your spells and exploring a very open set of environments.

Zune for Dummies hits the bookstores

Aug 13, 2007 1 min.

Brian was in town a few days ago and we ended up at a local bookstore… of course, since Brian hadn’t even seen our new book, we looked around and found a copy… 🙂

The Channel 9/Channel 10 team is hiring

Jun 28, 2007 2 min.

Hey folks, I work as the dev lead for Channel 9, Channel 10, Mix Online and other sites. We build community sites for Microsoft using video, audio and text blogging and we build them using the latest .NET technologies. If you are into web development, if you have a passion for design and user experience, and if you really rock at AJAX, Javascript, CSS, C# and ASP.NET …. then this is the job for you 🙂

Ratatouille preview article up on Xbox.com

Jun 25, 2007 1 min.

My latest kid-focused game article, which happens to be yet another movie tie-in, is about the upcoming Pixar film Ratatouille. Cool game, very nice looking… and it has entire missions around making recipes by spilling ingredients… just like how I cook at home!

Internal Microsoft tool, eScrum, is available to the public…

Jun 23, 2007 1 min.

We (the dev team behind Channel 9, Channel 10, Mix Online, and others…)been doing scrum-ish development for a few sprints now, but we recently switched to using eScrum. This is a set of templates and tools for use with Team Foundation Server and it really rocks. There are few less-than-polished elements about the install and the web interface, but I’m glad they shipped it out for general use. You can read a good summary of eScrum on the blog ‘A Developer’s Life’, which is also a good resource for lots of other Visual Studio related news.

Keeping in Touch, a new Xbox Dad article is live

Jun 14, 2007 1 min.

It has been ‘marketized’ a bit from how I originally wrote it (with the addition of a product name right into the title for one), but a ‘father’s day’ article from me is up on Xbox.com ### Keep in Touch with Xbox LIVE Vision Published June 13, 2007 It’s an interesting time of year for Dads. High school graduation is just around the corner and college graduation has probably already happened.

Need to write a parser of your own?

Jun 13, 2007 1 min.

I haven’t had to write a parser since university, but if I had to write one now I’d definitely be checking out Tommy Carlier’s 10 part series showing how to write a parser for a demo programming language of his own creation.

Yet another Xbox Dad article up, this one on games for the K-6 crowd

Jun 5, 2007 1 min.

Family Gaming with the K-6 Crowd With Father’s Day coming up, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own Dad and how I got into videogames as a kid. My parents, perhaps swayed by George Plimpton’s television commercials, went out and bought an Intellivision for the family. It was to be a Christmas gift for all of us, not just for me and my brother. It was hooked up to the only TV in the house, right in the living room where we spent our evenings.

If you are wondering where I get my Xbox Live info…

Jun 2, 2007 1 min.

A few people have emailed me or posted comments wondering how I grab the Xbox Info for the Twitter app and for my services. It is not from scraping and it is not from any publicly available source. I joined the Xbox Community Developer Program (XCDP), which is an official program designed to support folks who are building community sites (forums, reviews, blogs, etc…) around Xbox related topics. Many folks who want Xbox info, are not working on a large site like the people in the XCDP, which is exactly why I created my service.