Chris Williams may love the sound of his own tweets a little too much and he may have more tattoos than your grandma but apparently he did enough bad things in his previous life that he feels the need to give back...

So on September 24th in Bloomington Minnesota you can help him and the rest of the Twin Cities XNA user group raise some money for a good cause.

   ]]>]]>]]>zman@thezbuffer.com547:633543012000000000Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMThttp://www.thezbuffer.com/articles/546.aspx

Yes even shorter notice than Tuesdays talk announcement... so I'll just give the link and you can work it out yourself.

Turns out The ZMan needs to be able to read dates properly (it doesn't help that after 12 years I'm still not quite cool with having the month go first!). The talk is actually AUGUST 21st. So in fact you have over a months notice! New XNA MVP Joel Martinez will be giving the lowdown on XNA Game Studio

XNA at ONETUG. Orlando City Hall, Orlando, Florida

Paddles video tutorials

DVD quality is available for everyone and the quality seems just about good enough to read the code window. HD versions are available for paying subscribers

They also have some c# and Photoshop tutorials

If you have used any of the digital tutors stuff let me know what you think of it

Shader Pipeline with XSI and XNA

Looks like they have some other XNA related videos too

Can't find a copy of the conference just yet but it seems like GameSpot will have a copy to watch soon

So yesterday was the big Microsoft press conference and there were a few things that caught my eye from a game development point of view. (though I only caught the last hour so I may have missed something)

1. XNA Community games got a very short mention. They showed a video that had some of the current community games as well as few that I seem to remember from last years Dream Build Play. The 'date' mentioned was Fall which might sound different to the Holiday 2008 we have been hearing but since Winter starts December 21st I guess they technically overlap. No new news announced here.
2. New dashboard - I missed this bit so I don't know if this will affect the Community games part of the dashboard.
3. Avatars - similar to the avatars on other consoles you can customize a look alike (or not look a like) and have it appear in games. Lets hope the XNA Framework allows us access to these models as some point.
4. Some new fun stuff to do with the Xbox camera. The new Viva Pinata game uses the camera to read trading cards and You're in the movies records your actions while you play fun games and then edits the footage into short little movie clips. Seems like some fun things to do with the camera... maybe one day we will get some access to that.
5. Finally a couple of new controllers - an improved Guitar Hero controller which should hopefully just map to an standard XInput device and a new Microphone for the Lips karaoke game which, like the Rock Band microphone will need special drivers and a new API.

So looking forward to some announcements at GameFest where maybe we will learn if any of this new stuff will be available to us

Sorry for the short notice - I only just found out about this myself.

If you are close to Dallas then head along to the SMU Guildhall tonight at 7pm. Check out the details on Chris Koenig's blog

There's plenty of threads in the forums with people who get the 'The project type is not supported by this installation' error. In fact due to a brain fart I even got it myself last week. Generally this error happens when you try to open a project written in a version of Game Studio (Express) in a version of Visual Studio that doesn't have that GS(E) installed. Most commonly because you don't have that GS(E) installed at all but one case I have seen is when you try to open a v1 file by clicking the .sln and it opens the non express version of VS. Since GS1 didn't work with VS Pro or above you can NEVER open that project unless you have express installed.

So here's how to tell which version a project is:

1. Open the project file (NOT the solution file) in notepad
2. Find the lines with <XnaFrameworkVersion> and <XnaPlatform>. This will contain v1.0, v2.0 or v3.0 and Windows, Zune or Xbox 360

In addition you can check the Project type Guid as this is what VS is checking when you get that error message

1. Find the line with <ProjectTypeGuids> ignore the 2nd GUID (FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC) as its always the same and represents that these project types are for C#
2. Look in the table below to find the one that matches

* These projects MUST be opened in VC# Express 2005. Sometimes even though you have 1.0 refresh installed the .sln files will open the non express version and give you the error

There are some Vista registry issues which can be fixed by reading this blog http://brianpeek.com/blog/archive/2007/11/29/weird-vista-registry-issue.aspx which on occasion also seem to cause this error message.

Thanks to Aaron for checking and adding some detail and Stephen for pointing out the very obvous verison and platform tags that I had missed!

If you are not a forum regular you probably missed the following job announcements. Microsoft is a great place to work and the XNA team seem like a great bunch of folk (well the ones I have met - the team is getting too big for me to know everyone these days)

Web Developer

Technical Program Manager

UZ Designer

User groups are starting up everywhere. Even the Canadians want to get in on the game now.

So if you live near Calgary, Canada and you have any kind of interested in XNA Game Studio then you need to visit their website and find out when and where.

XNA Calgary User Group
When: June 11th 2008, 7-9pm
Where: SAIT Main Campus in the Heart Building, Wing 'D', Room 201 (MD-201).

Micheal Klucher will be speaking tonight at the Puget Sound hand held user group about games on the Zune. Sadly I have other commitments so I can't go along.

7:00pm May 27th, Microsoft Campus building 113/1021

More details on their website http://pshandheld.com/default.aspx