XNA Essentials

Make sure that you get your XNA Game Studio 3.1 game submitted to the contest today. Show Microsoft what you have been working on for the last 4 months or more. Grand prize is $40,000. Do not wait until the last moment to try and upload your game. Head over to http://www.dreambuildplay.com/ and submit your game now!

Hope everyone does well!

If you submitted your game to the DBP competition and want to show off your work, feel free to post in the forums. The forum is also for any XNA work that has been done. Make sure to read the Showcase Guidelines before posting.

Happy Sharing!

-Chad

I finally was able to spend some time this weekend to give this website the attention it deserved. I have installed Community Server 2008.5 SP2 and am now running the site with that. I have configured the site to only utilize a single blog. The biggest pain was trying to make sure all my old links still worked in the new site. The bits that took the longest were making sure the links at the root level still worked. Fortunately, it seems everything is working just fine.

We now have Forums! No longer are people required to use the Amazon forums. It seems that really wasn't ideal because of the different countries. This should work much better.

The blog entries actually have comments. Currently the two tutorials I have on the site are custom pages, but I think I will either convert those into a blog entry or into forum posts so there can be comments on them. The original website did not have anyway for the users to communicate to me or each other. Community Server corrects this.

Hopefully there aren't any outstanding issues, but if so I'll try and correct them as soon as possible.

Happy surfing!

Chad

My second book, Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0 Unleashed has just left the printers. I received a copy of the book yesterday. It is available for purchase from Amazon and other retailers. This book includes 9 new chapters in 3 new sections. These include chapters on creating games for the Zune, creating multiplayer games and best practices to sell games on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace.

More information about the book can be found in the Unleashed section of the site. The errata for the book has been started and can be found here.

I will be revamping this site and will include forums directly on this site so we do not have to use the Amazon forums. I realized recently that the Amazon forums were country dependant and there were posts I didn't see from the UK. Having the forums on my server should help with that. I'm working diligently to get them up soon.

Happy Coding!

-Chad

I wanted to announce that I look at Amazon's forums for this book.  So if there are any questions or comments, etc they can be directed there.

Amazon Forum for Microsoft XNA Unleashed

While I'm here, I should mention that I have been patiently waiting for another good review to come my way.  I have read good reviews on the web of the book, but none of those have made their way to Amazon.  A sampling of what I found ...

http://p2p.wrox.com/topic.asp?whichpage=1&TOPIC_ID=63544&#135895

http://www.albertrosa.com/index.php/2007/08/14/xna-splat-game-goals/

http://www.kinlan.co.uk/2007/08/review-microsoft-xna-unleashed-by-chad.html

http://blog.radioact1ve.com/2007/08/reading-part-15.html

http://forums.xna.com/thread/19922.aspx

I am contemplating writing another book on a different subject as well as adding more content (tutorials) to this site and making a second edition of this book when the XNA Framework 2.0 comes out.  However, the last thing I want to do is provide a book that isn't valuable for the majority of people buying it.  If you enjoyed the book, would you consider writing a review on Amazon?  For that matter, if you didn't enjoy the book could you also write a review?  It would really help me determine if I should continue in the book authoring business or gracefully fade away ... Of course it would help others to know if they should separate with their hard earned money or not.

Happy Coding (and Reviewing)!

--Chad