I mentioned a while ago that i've got a XBOX360. Now that i've played a few games i can write a minireview.
First of all the XBOX360. I love it and i'm simply not going back to PC gaming. I love the wireless, playing on the 42 inch HDTV with a 5.1 audio system and the overall simplicity ( no drivers, installs, resolutions, Starforce and all that crap). You just insert the disc and play. But, from my point of view, the best thing about playing on a console is the fact that you are not "tied" to a desk as in PC gaming.( as a programmer i'm already spending ~10h/day in front of a monitor).

Games :
Assassin's Creeed

This is a really mixed bag. Nothing is "medium" in this game.....it's either absolutely fantastic or crap. The good parts are, without a doubt, the graphic and animations: i haven't played Crysis but this is, by far, the best looking game ever. Seriously. The graphics and animation are simply amazing. Most of the games you'll play after Assasin's Creed will seem bland (graphics wise).
The biggest bad part is the gameplay which is simply repetitive and boring. Storywise is not that great either. I really hope the sequel will be better because it's simply shame to waste that graphic.

PGR 4 : PGR4 is a blast. Great selection of cars and tracks, with furious gameplay. Really good in split screen mode.

Timeshift : this a "old school" ( and by that i mean no story, linear design) FPS. It has a few nice graphical effects but "the thing" is that you can manipulate time in this.

Call of Duty 4 Nice. Had a few great gameplay portions.

Gears of war : i would venture to say that this is the best game i've played so far on XBOX360.

Halo 3 : it's mediocre : graphic (except for the draw distance....this game has the longest draw distance i have seen so far) and gameplay. The music was nice (especially the main menu music).

Virtua Fighter 5 : it's ok but i really wished it had more characters to choose from.

Virtua Tennis 3 : it's GREAT when you play in 2 player mode. Also it has some nice additional play modes. If you like tennis don't miss this.

MX vs ATV : Graphics are really crappy and the gameplay is not that great either.

Stranglehold

This is something like Max Payne 3 ( without the great story and the cool character). It has bullet time and absolutely GREAT destructive environments.

Conan : THQ should have given more time to Nihilistic for this ( Nihilistic are a great bunch of guys ....they made the original Vampire Masquerade Redemption and i'm sure Nihilistic would have made a great game). Instead ...only the fighting (aka combo system) is great but the rest is simply mediocre (story, gameplay, sound) or simply bad (graphics...it looks like a mediocre PS2 game). Also the last boss fight was crap.

Buffer.BlockCopy seems to be faster than Array.Copy. Looks like it's just memcpy without the additional type checking /conversions built into Array.Copy.

This is a new type in 2.0 . It's a string, which apparently is created by allocating a block of unmanaged memory (the CLR doesn't know about it) and which encrypts each char. It should be used for safe string handling operations. I stumbled upon it from ProcessStartInfo.

....Separation of concerns

As a employee of a company which does outsourcing, i get to work with a lot with bad smelly, rotten code. Things like reinventing the whell (like rewriting a function which already exists in the framework), breaking the DRY principle (copy & paste programming) end up beeing just small nuisances for me. What really irks me is code that breaks the separation of concerns. All too often i end up debugging code written by so called "senior programmers" which looks something like this : - big function (+ 200 LOC) - everything is in the event handler in the UI. (buttonOk_OnClick) - read UI data - go to database to retrieve some data - add some logic - go again to the database to retrieve another needed data - add more logic, also using some hardcoded values. -save into database I hate this kind of code. Separation of concerns should be the first thing someone should learn when he writes code for a living.

If somebody still doubts that the right way to build desktop applications is to use native OS widgets , should take a look at Safari 3 on Windows. Leaving aside the fact that vulnerabilites have been discovered a few hours after it went public, the fact that it crashes on me every 10 minutes , the wierd ClearType implementation.....what make Safari an instant uninstall is the fact that you can resize the window ONLY from the bottom right corner. Absolute crap UI experience.

So finally Apple realised that most people don't give a flying ...thing about testing their web sites with Safari so they released a version for Windows. How touching.

Rob Relyea, the program manager for WPF & Xaml Language Teams, responded to my post in which i complained about the fact that XAML is case sensitive. Here are some facts : - the WPF API will be CLS compliant ( so it can be used from case insensitive languages like VB.NET) . So the XAML case sensitivity can't be forced by the API (the Button class , for instance, can't have 2 properties named "Content" and "content")
- the purpose of XAML, as a text based high level markup language is, to be used from multiple content providers (developer and designer tools, hand written etc) and to be easily created/modified (that's why it text based instead of a binary format). That's why the tools don't spit BAML but XAML.
So, with all these, why make it case sensitive ? It will only make it harder to modify it manually. I'm sure VS Orcas will have a good XAML editor. But you know what.....to make a small change to a HTML file i don't use Visual Studio. I use the "instant load" Notepad++ editor. That's how i was expecting to edit XAML too.....with Notepad++. Case sensitivy hurts a lot this "quick edit" scenario.

After trying in vain for a while to discover a desktop blogging tools which works with b2evolution blogging engine, is stumbled upon w.bloggar (yes shockingly i prefere dektop apps to web based ones). Best of all it's free. Now my blogging "productivity" started to go uphill :)

Recommanded tool.

Jeff Atwood has a inflamatory post called Who Killed the Desktop Application? in which compares Microsoft Streets and Trips with the Google Maps and concludes that desktop applications-- at least desktop mapping applications-- are dead.
I'm a desktop apps junkie. I mentioned it in the past time and time again that i always would use a desktop app insted of a web app. So this post bothered me and i would like to point out some things : - the post name if fucked up. It implies that desktop applications are "dead" which is simply wrong.
-it compares 2 applications and reaches to a flawed conclusion. Has mr Atwood ever thought that he could find better alternatives for desktop mapping software than MS Strrets and Trips ?
- the web app is Googles. This is a funny thing....when somebody wants to demonstrate the "advantage" of web applications it always uses a Google app. A shocking truth but not every web application runs on huge network of computers. Does mr Atwood really needs for someone to point him to some sloooooooow, fugly web apps ? On the other hand a desktop apps ALWAYS works as better as you computer allows it.
- another thing he mentions it "All the innovation in user interface seems to be taking place on the web, and desktop applications just aren't keeping up" . Actually the innovations in UI design happen nowadays in games. Yeap....you read correct. In games. Which....shocking...are desktop apps.

The conclusion is that's simply a wrong named, misguided (yet another) attempt to (try to) prove that "web apps" are better. Riiiiiiiight.....

I wonder what the heck is the ideea about making XAML case sensitive ?! Case sensitive markup code = pure evil.