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.

Check out the replacement EquatableWeakReference<T>EquatableWeakReference<T> class

A weak reference lets you hold a reference to an object that will not prevent it from being garbage collected. There are a few scenarios where this might be important – such as listening for events, caching, various MVC patterns.

While a big fan of patterns I found the original Gang of Four (GoF) book a little dry and so had left the pattern books alone until Martin Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (PEAA), got referenced so many times on-line I gave in and purchased a copy. I’m glad I did – even if the examples are mostly in Java with the very occasional one in C#.

The patterns in the original GoF were really about the interactions between the objects themselves and whilst PEAA has some object-to-object interactions it concentrates on problems encountered in “Enterprise Applications”. This includes database mappings, transactions, web pages and concurrency.

I was very fortunate to receive a Nintendo DS Lite for my birthday and a voucher for a couple of games – I’d wanted one for a while but put it off being that I already a couple of hand-held gaming systems.

The DS Lite is tricky to compare to the PSP being that they take such different approaches. Sony has tried to make the PSP a portable multimedia station supporting UMD movies, video and music on memory sticks and it’s reasonably large wide-screen display as well as playing games.

On the 16th of June an email appeared in my inbox with the subject “Love football, gambling and DVDs?”. Strange, the Gmail spam filter normally does a sterling job of blocking these.

Dear entertainment lover, It’s not long now until the first England game, and everyone’s talking about football and making bets. Well we at ScreenSelect.co.uk are no different but we also realize that there’s plenty of time between games for other forms of entertainment. “

As most people know these things run quite warm but at last two applications are available for getting hold of those elusive CPU temperature figures.

When in Mac OS X grab a copy of the free CoreDuoTemp.

I’ve been using my MacBook Pro now for about a month and think it’s the ultimate developer machine. You really are spoiled for choice and everything you might want is at your fingertips.

Every Mac ships with the Xcode developer tool set. This gives you the native preferred Mac development platform called Cocoa which uses Objective-C at it’s core. The actual tools are based around the GCC 4 compiler and GDB debugger with a rather nice Xcode IDE and Interface Builder GUI designer from it’s NextStep origins.