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!.




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