Microsoft tag

While we still wait to hear details of Sony’s homebrew offerings of the PS3 (we know it runs on Linux, but no one knows how exactly yet), Microsoft announces what it is going to do.

Called XNA Game Studio Express, it will be a free program available to anyone who wishes to make games for the Xbox 360. On top of that, for a US$99 annual fee, you can join a “Creators Club,” and share your work with others.

XNA Game Studio Express will be allowed to make commercial Windows games, but only non-commercial X360 games.

However, there is a couple of catches. Some of them probably easy to overcome,

These requirements include that the intended recipient of the content must be logged in to Xbox Live and have an active subscription to the XNA Creators Club, must have downloaded the XNA Framework runtime environment for the Xbox 360, and must have XNA Game Studio Express installed on their own development PC.

The person who wants to play your game then needs to download the source code and then recompile it on their computers and transfer it over to their X360’s in order to play. You also cannot put it on a memory card and go over to a friends house with it.

Hopefully Sony will one-up them in that respect. As said, it comes with Linux and it is already known what libraries they are using in games. This may make Sony issue a statement soon.

The XNA FAQ is also available to read now.

I’ve been hearing recently talk of a possible virus outbreak that is due to a recently found flaw in Windows 2000 and up (including XP SP2). Microsoft has issued a Security Advisory warning of Win32/Graweg which exploits code in Augusts set of patches.

The Microsoft Security Response Alliance partners as well as our own internal teams have determined that there is not widespread customer impact and have rated Win32/Graweb as a Low threat. At this time it does not appear to be a self-replicating internet-wide worm.

Microsoft continues to recommend that customers apply the August updates as soon as possible with additional urgency and consideration given to the update detailed in MS06-040.

While we can only watch and wait to see if anything would come of it, it is still a good idea to update. You should be doing it anyway.

It has recently been announced that IE7 will be a high priority update when it is released. There are some good points and some bad points I’d like to raise.

The good point is everyone will automatically be getting the latest version of the browser, it is pretty slick (yes, you heard me) and has lots of feature enhancements. It can make my job of modifying this site easier as a lot of people will get the latest version right off the bat.

The bad point though is that I cannot test my web browser in both versions at the same time. This is a terrible thing. When I made the Gallery posts (the ones where there are lots of images and you can click on them to view images and videos) I tested it in Firefox and Internet Explorer 7. I assumed IE6 would be alright. Shortly, I uninstalled IE7 for various reasons that I can’t remember. Checked out the website and it was broken in IE6. Now, I’m not going to be one that’ll install and uninstall IE7 just to test my websites.

A lot of other web developers are having the same gripes. IE7 does have a lot of changes, they have fixed a lot of stuff meaning that hacks are no longer necessary (IE6 has lots of hacks to get it working correctly). How are we supposed to test on both IE6 and IE7 without having Windows installed twice? Terrible!