Daniel Fernandez (and others) -- Coding for Fun

Hey Niners!

Thanks for watching the video. Let me try to answer some of these questions you have:
1) Link to "Beginners" Webcast:
Visual Basic: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vb/learning/
Visual C#: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualCSharp/learning/

2) re: Geekling's comment about taking the USB Wireless Security key out of the computer, yes you could do that. But it would just end up "thinking" that you were no longer at your computer, so if it was programmed to lock your workstation it would do that. "Secure by default."
I think that the "Security key" branding of these devices is kind of misleading but that's what they are sold and marketed as. For use with our project I prefer to think of it more as a presence monitor (am I at my computer or not?). Then we can program all sorts of tasks around the concept of whether I'm at my computer or not. For instance, do I want to lock my workstation when I step away from my desk? Do I want to mute my workstation? Set Messenger to "Away"? Defrag my hard drive or clear my Internet Explorer cache. Any task you can dream up really.

Here's another idea I had for these keys... in our office and I'm sure many other offices around the world people are always printing documents and often forget to pick them up at the printer. Sometimes sensitive data is left on the printer, or trees are wasted on reams of documents people forget to claim. I think a company could save a lot of money and protect their confidential documents by requiring everybody to carry one of these presence indicators to the print room to pick up their job. Once the print server detected the person was in the room it would print their job - but not before. Of course this requires that the person waits for their job to print, but at least it's queued up to the print server already. Ok niners, who wants to write the application? I'll bet you could even make money selling it to companies. Coding4Fun becomes Coding4Profit!


3) BenZilla: Re: HalfLife 2 we're still waiting for Valve to update their source code to compile with Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition. It was supposed to be ready by now but understandably I think they are probably working on getting some other game titles ready for the holiday season. Once they update their source code, though, you'll be able to use Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition to create "mods" for Half-Life 2. If you have Visual C++ .NET 2003 you can do that today - you can get started using the community and documentation sites we called out here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/half-life/default.aspx

4) Re: the research assistant, Andy's response was spot on. Sometimes we find that hobbyist coding projects really are all about the challenge. For example, I've always dreamed about what it would take to build my own Web browser. In no way do I ever think that I could build a Web browser which was better than IE or FireFox, I'm just interested in the challenge because it's a mentally stimulating way of learning more about coding. That's common with many of the things we do on Coding4Fun. If you download the game created using the Gaming 101 Webcasts it pales in comparison to even an old Atari game, but the principles you learn along the way to build that game (sprite collision detection for example) are invaluable building blocks if you want to be a game developer or just learn more about how games are built.

Keep the great questions and ideas coming

Brian Keller

BenZilla wrote:

Thanks Brian, apparently there was going to be some integration between steam and VS05(it was on some random microsoft research webcast with some guys with valve and Kang Su(SP?) from Microsoft)

Is there any info on this? Where will I be able to get it? Because stock express does not include it.

And what kind of content are you thinking of doing?

Wow - you're an astute follower of this topic! I was driving this project and we started about a year ago. We did get a prototype working which allowed you to click "File -> New -> Half-Life 2 Mod" and it would present you with a wizard to help you build your first mod. But it was really just that - your first mod - and the way it worked was to create a copy of an existing weapon class (e.g. crowbar) and allow you to create a new class which was a copy of the other class with strings replaced (e.g. baseball bat).
Unfortunately, while this helped you build your very first mod it was only good at your first mod. And it also required us to make some hard assumptions about the Source SDK code. And unfortunately since Valve is in a position to update the SDK code any time they want, it means that they could easily make an update which broke our integration wizard. Of course, updating our bits along with Valve's updates is something which is solvable, but way beyond the level of resources we had to devote to this project. Keep in mind that Coding4Fun was started by a few Microsoft folks and people in the community for the love of coding on a shoestring budget and our spare time. We didn't want to release an integration pack into the community which was going to be broken in 3 months and cause a lot of customers confusion about why their mods weren't compiling.
So unfortunately in the end we ended up scrapping this project because we found that 99% of the value was really in delivering an IDE which allowed people to mod Half-Life 2. So instead we've been focusing on trying to get Valve to update their source code so it would compile with Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition. We're still waiting on them to make that change. Feel free to throw some "consumer demand" behind the problem by posting at their forums and emailing them.

Brian Keller