The NXE is finally out! The next time you switch on your Xbox (if you haven’t already), you will be prompted to update.

So now I must say, welcome to the NXE. I successfully got it from the second round of the preview program, and have been enjoying it since. It is a great change that really gives a new breath of life to the Xbox 360.

Whilst I was sitting on twitter and watching my friends login and gain the download tonight, I wrote up a small widget for BlogEngine.Net that displays your GamerCard, provided by MyGamerCard.Net.

If you want it for your own blog, you can download it from here. Instructions are in the archive.

(Or from my Skydrive)

On another note, A Kingdom for Keflings was released for Arcade, which takes advantage of the avatars you create when you download the NXE.

I recently finished my server platform move with my hosting company, and now am working to get my site hosted on IIS7+Server 2008.

I have decided to shift my MVC efforts from a website like this to another area, probably a portal for UTS MSP.

In the meanwhile I have also updated to the latest version of BlogEngine.net and hope that there are no issues. ;) If you notice anything, leave a comment.

I am currently in the process of working with my webhost to move my site over to their new platform. The benefits of this means I can use subdomains properly (I think) and they promise me that I will be on the Windows Server 2008 platform, which means IIS7. :) (That lets me use things like the URL rewrite module)

Due to the inspirational talk by Scott Hanselman at TechEd Sydney 2008 I am also considering using Asp.Net MVC to create a new blogging/content platform to replace BlogEngine.net on this website. Currently BlogEngine.net is serving me well, however I do like to write my own, and I would prefer to bake in a good page system rather than adding to a token implementation on a blogging platform.

More info once I make the move, and once I get started on the project. Might even make a small screencast or write a tutorial on it.

Pretty cool. Wordle generates word clouds from text provided, or RSS feeds. This one for example came from my blog homepage.

It is free, just visit http://wordle.net/ to make one of your own. They use a Java applet to generate the image, and you can customise many aspects of it.

Just want to say happy new year to all those reading. It has been a great year for myself, I finished up my final year of school and will be starting university next year.

I have a couple of things planned for the new year, now that I have time to work exclusively on programming items. I have an idea for an XNA tool I want to implement that can make things easier, especially with file size restrictions. I also have a project that I need to get started on, also XNA related, but more on that should appear in the new year.

In any case, I hope you all have a good new year, and that we continue to progress. For those still awaiting midnight, don't party too hard. ;)

The software I use for this blog got a minor version update today, from 1.2 to 1.3, pretty fast for about 2 1/2 months of work, and a good list of new features and changes. I have taken the time to upgraded to 1.3, must have done something wrong since there were issues with roles and users not transferring right, but that is stuff you don't need to worry about.

This software is a great piece of blogging software written in asp.net 2.0, and with plenty of features being added all the time, as well as a reasonably stable codebase that can be pulled from the CodePlex repository for it.

I am almost done with a basic sample for my Post Processing class, I just need to finish the shader and add some more comments, then pack it up. It should be up here shortly, then I will drop it into my HMEngine branch and work on implementing it in that project as well. So far it is pretty powerful, I just need a nice little usage guide to explain how to put it to use properly, that will come with the sample.

Again with the new blogs, but anyway, phpBB is too big for just blogging, since this is a personal blog there isn't any reason to have a full forum behind it.

So thanks to the BlogEngine.net people, I have a nice little blog to put my stuff with all the features, and in .Net as well. :)

So basically my plans for my time during the holidays now is to create a sample for my ported Post Processor for XNA2.0 (See file dump below for 1.0Refresh version), and also get that integrated into the Hazy Mind engine, with a new tutorial for that.

After that, work on some projects I have been slowly making my way through, they may/may not appear on here, and also get around to learning the graphical content creation aspects of game development, so that I can get content for my XNA games done.

So basically this blog will contain not only XNA and programming related stuff, but also my own personal items, gaming related etc, if you want to focus, there are categories for that.   ;)

In other news, Nemo Krad released his XNA game Breakthrough for both Windows and the Xbox360, this is a new take on the old Breakout/Arkanoid classic, but in 3D, so the ball can move in X,Y and Z, and there are powerups etc, and some nice shader effects. Check it out over at http://darkomengames.co.uk and give it a try.

Now for the file dump, this is basically all the files I uploaded for my old blog (not much) that people might still want to grab, since I do not want to go and recreate the old posts for them.

Post Processor (1.0 Refresh)

and thats about it, the screenshots from Halo 3 I see no point in putting back up.

So subscribe to the RSS feed and there should be more up here soon.