Who says Game Developers don't use .NET?

Recently I took my kid to a local bowling alley that has a nice game room where he likes to play racing car type-videogames. The first pic below, which I snapped with my camera phone, shows the front of "Need for Speed Underground" by EA. But, what's that whitish looking thing in the middle of the screen?



Well, as can be seen in the following close-up, it's the Common Language Runtime Debugging Services dialog for an unhandled exception!

Looks like our EA lead developer didn't finish his last debugging session, heh? Of course, I must admit this is somewhat familiar -- where I work, the QA Department consists of "push it into production"!



Kudos to EA for some cool game programming with .NET and DirectX. But - BADDD on the developer who didn't put in an unhandled exception logger that would restart the app and let the poor user who just dropped three quarters in there get a free game... the high road is "oops - we screwed up - the next game is free." Let's take the high road, guys - it's those kids' quarters that are paying your salary, no? (not to mention the fact that Dad was the guy who just funded your little unhandled exception experiment!)



Team Development Note:

If you are an ASP.NET developer who works in a team environment, I'd highly recommend Omar Khan's Blog post (with screen caps) of how to create sub-projects in IIS with the Web Application Project feature of Visual Studio 2005. Omar is a master presenter with a very outgoing personality and great communications skills, and those skills shine in this first of a series. View it here!.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FIREFOX / IE Word-Wrap, Word-Break, TABLES FIX

One of the most annoying things a developer (who would normally delight in writing code, not futzing with markup) can have is getting rendering issues between different browsers. The two biggest players are of course Internet Exploder and Firefart (as I lovingly like to refer to each). In most cases that's going to take care of 98 percent of your total site traffic. IE has had a proprietary "word-break" style attribute for a long time, and this made it into the CSS 3.0 spec. But that doesn't necessarily help you with Firefox right now. Firefox literally - (and I consider this completely idiotic, since it's been in their bug database for FIVE YEARS) does not have a reliable CSS style element to force table cell content to break in the middle of a word in order to stop the content from expanding your table / div off the page or over other content on the page. Here's a partial fix, which will work for most tables and browsers. The style declaration (I call it m
Read more

Some observations on Script Callbacks, "AJAX", "ATLAS" "AHAB" and where it's all going.

I've taken a more than cursory interest in the whole Remote Scripting (.NET species) vs. AJAX and now ATLAS discussion, mostly because I started using Remote Scripting since Microsoft first released it, and because I continued to refine it after seeing Brent Ashley's excellent work with JSRS, which was one of the first "real" cross-browser solutions back in 2000 (that's the turn of the Century for you history buffs). Now Bertrand Leroy, a Microsoft guy whose work I like , has authored some very interesting ASP.NET 2.0 script callback stuff that he points to on his blog, and he is obviously (at least, to me he is) involved quite heavily in the development of this new ATLAS infrastructure that they'll preview at PDC. Leroy's most recent post brings to the surface what I agree are the major differences between the "AJAX a - la .NET" approach as popularized by Michael Swartz with his AJAX.NET library, and Leroy's RefreshPanel, the ASP.NET 2.0 b
Read more

IE7 - Vista: "Internet Explorer has stopped Working"

Image
This one was a bitch. All of a sudden for no reason at all, out of the blue, I get this dialog "internet Explorer has stopped working". I didn't install any new software, crap- I didn't do anything! So here I am using FIREFART to go on the internet and find out what to do! Damn! Good thing I've got the sucker on the same machine (I'm not "anti-Firefox", i just don't use it that much except to check my page renderings). The Fix The fix (at least for me): 1) Go into Control Panel, and choose "Internet Options". 2) Under the "Advanced" tab, press the "RESET" button at the lower right: Don't ask me why this happens, or why the fix works. That's a BUG, D00D - I don't care how you slice it!
Read more