Last weekend, I downloaded the XNA 2.0 toolkit and get the kids involved in Software Development.  What we’re going to do is create our own Video Game.  We were able to get a very basic game that we all worked on during the weekend to run on the XBOX 360.  It’s nothing special but it did get the kids very excited about creating our own Game.

I downloaded Blender, an excellent Open Source modeling tool.  Megan has been playing around with it and has begun to understand how to create some very simple models.

Maloree was been using Garageband on the iMac to create some very basic sound effects. (Probably something better out there, but she loves using Garageband and now she has a reason to use it.)

Mark’s been creating the game attributes and creating the script for the future game we plan on developing. He’s got about 30 sheets of drawings done and has his own Folder that he put them all in.  Pretty funny but it’s great to see him put so much passion into it.

This should be fun and it will get everyone involved and get them exposed to software development. For myself, this is a nice change from the mundane development for business that I’ve been now doing for over 15 years.  Now the weekends I can keep my skills up and also have the kids involved!

The great thing about XNA is that you use Visual Studio 2005 and C# to do the development in. Since I’ve been using C# since its inception I feel really comfortable working in the environment. Now it’s learning all about 3D development and how it really works.  This should be a really fun project for the weekends and I hope the kids will stay with it for at a little while!

In the past, we’ve tried so hard to first use Microsoft products when available to fit a need.  However lately, we’ve come to realize that there are just some products that are better and worth taking a look at.  One of them is VMware.  We’ve been using Microsoft Virtual Server for over two years now.  Microsoft Virtual Server has worked OK, but its not been the best experience.

Recently when we moved our servers over to a new hosting provider and got ourselves 3 new 64 bit Servers with 8 gigs of RAM on each of them, we decided to use VMware Instead. All I can say is WOW, what a difference.  The configuration and performance has been outstanding.  Our development branch down in Mexico has also recently upgraded their servers to VMware too and based on my conversations with them also they love it better and can’t imagine switching back.

This weekend I decided to give VMware Fusion for the Mac a shot on my iMac. In the past I’ve used Parallels and for the most part its been pretty good.  Last Month, one of my clients who happen to be using a Mac and run Windows in Virtualization mode suggested I give VMware Fusion a chance.  My iMac also has Boot camp installed and I’m running WIndows XP (Remember I switched back!).  VMWare has a great feature that I can use the native partition as a Virtual Image.  The performance has been excellent! I get the best of both worlds.  I can run in Virtual Mode while in OSX but still boot into Windows natively if I need to something like requires heavy use of the GPU.   It’s been extremely stable and I would suggest to anyone who is considering Virtualization on the Mac, to take a look at VMware Fusion instead of Parallels.