I got a new silver Sony EyeToy for my birthday (along with the EyeToy 3 games, thanks Amy!) and found that it didn’t want to play with Windows.

The earlier black model worked just fine with a modified INF file and so it was back to notepad to slip in the required lines.

Beta 1 of Microsoft’s free XNA Game Studio Express product should be available for download later today.

If you haven’t already got started you’ll need to download the following bits first:

Selecting the right object-relational mapper is a tricky decision with many factors to weigh up.

One of the basic decisions is whether to go with a dynamic run-time (“black-box”) or a code generator.

In a previous post I described a WeakReference<T>WeakReference<T> class for providing strongly-typed WeakReferenceWeakReference objects.

GitHub has the latest version of EquatableWeakReference<T>EquatableWeakReference<T>

It’s been an odd couple of weeks for my MacBook Pro 15″.

First of all I find that my battery is one affected by a recall and so Apple send me a new battery complete with incorrect instructions on how to return.

This article is now out of date. Check Apple’s Boot Camp page for up-to-date information.

Apple have released Boot Camp 1.1 which, at a whopping 202MB, adds:

Over the last few months I’ve pieced together various snippets and hints from the web to come to the conclusion that Microsoft’s forthcoming XNA platform, specifically the XNA Framework version, would be available to home-brew developers and let them develop on the Xbox 360 — the first official home-brew since the PlayStation 1’s Net Yaroze!

Indeed I’ve been telling people in IRC and on forums that I believe this to be true. One friend, after messing with Managed DirectX2, told me if I was wrong about this I was in trouble. I went as so far to claim that it’s already tested and GarageGames Marble Blast Ultra was an XNA Framework title.

The Rumor mills were overflowing with ideas of what Apple might show at this year’s WWDC and so I like many other interested parties sat down through the hour long presentation albeit via a delayed stream.

The highlight of the shows was the new Mac Pro which is a dual-processor Intel Core 2 Duo Xeon machine which replaces the PowerMac G5. Whilst it retains the enclosure everything inside is new including the Intel chips, much better performance, 4 SATA snap-in drive enclosures, dual optical bays, 16TB of RAM and space for more slots whilst also being 64-bit like its predecessor — and unlike the previous Intel Mac’s.

Just a few days ago I found myself needing to calculate a CRC-32 in .NET. With so many facilities available I was a little shocked that there was nothing built-in to do it so knocked up something myself.

GitHub has the latest version of Crc32

As the power of next generation systems increases so does the complexity and realism they can portray.

For some time now consumers have been unhappy with the rising prices of computer games whilst publishers are citing spiraling production costs as the excuse for sticking with “tried and tested” formulas and franchises.