So my last blog post got a sur­pris­ing amount of atten­tion, not least from a/the (no clue how many there are of those) Prod­uct Man­ager of Visual Stu­dio, which is pretty neat.

So, here’s a quick fol­lowup, in order to fully exploit my 15 min­utes of fame!

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Hooray!

Games for Win­dows Live is being relaunched again.

Con­sid­er­ing all the fun I had last time, I per­son­ally can’t wait for this. (more…)

I don’t get it.

They obvi­ously went to a lot of trou­ble to design a new touch-based inter­face. But because they need back­wards com­pat­i­bil­ity as well, they have a “tra­di­tional” apps iso­lated into a kind of “Win­dows 7 ghetto”, some­thing that looks just like Win­dows 7, and with no vis­i­ble trace of being inte­grated into the whole Win8/touch thing… And this is for tra­di­tional PC’s. On my PC, I’m appar­ently going to have to choose which envi­ron­ment I’m using cur­rently, because there’s lim­ited inter­ac­tion between them. And both worlds are going to suf­fer from that. (more…)

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post that you might con­sider “mildly crit­i­cal”, dis­cussing the brand new Games for Win­dows Live web-based store, and the count­less ways in which it fell apart as soon as you looked at it.

Today, I went to look at their site again, as they have Deus Ex on sale, and, while it is a 10 year old game, and I already have it, I was inter­ested in see­ing if they’d opened up the store for peo­ple out­side Amer­ica and the UK yet. (more…)

Once again, Microsoft “relaunched” Games for Win­dows Live, either gam­bling that if they keep relaunch­ing the same thing, even­tu­ally every­one will just give up and start using it, or per­haps that if they keep relaunch­ing the same thing, even­tu­ally every­one will just give up and buy an XBox 360 instead. I don’t know. But it is really get­ting ridiculous.

Unlike the last time it “relaunched”, how­ever, this time it actu­ally has a new fea­ture as well: it is now pos­si­ble to view (and use) their store from a browser, or so they claim. And what’s more, games can now, appar­ently, be bought using money, actual human cur­rency, rather than imag­i­nary Microsoft Points.

In prac­tice? Not so much. (more…)

A term that’s become very pop­u­lar, and which espe­cially Microsoft’s devel­op­ers seem to cham­pion, is “dog­food­ing”. The idea that as a devel­oper, you should use your own prod­ucts on a daily basis, even dur­ing devel­op­ment. This exposes you to all the weak­nesses and flaws of the prod­uct, and makes you much bet­ter equipped to deliver a prod­uct that’s actu­ally worth using. (more…)

I’m sorry. This isn’t going to be pretty. (more…)