CCNetConfig

Yesterday Microsoft announced that, if you have a premium XNA membership, you can publish your games on Xbox Live Market place and make up to 70% of the games total revenue. Depending on the success of the game, it may even be advertised on Xbox dashboard, and other Microsoft online properties.

I think this is a huge step for student or hobbyist developers and for the gamers. It will encourage more people to become interested in developing with the XNA framework,  a larger group of developers to purchase the premium memberships, which in turn, will mean more Xbox Live arcade games for the gamers.

I would like to see the framework open up a little more so applications, not just games can be developed. And I mean applications that I would want to use on my Xbox, like an RSS reader, or being able to check my email. I actually know a few people that have an Xbox 360, have internet access, but do not have a computer. They don't want a computer, but want to be able to send and receive email. Here is me dreaming that the day will come....

It has been a little while since I have posted to the blog. I took a little time off from developing in my free time to take care of some things, and for a much needed break in coding outside of work. I was getting burnt out and wanted to spend more time doing things with my son. I think Call Of Duty 4 played a part in the time off too... I am going to get back on a regular posting schedule again.

A little over a month ago, the Sandcastle project was removed (or marked unpublished) on CodePlex because it did not contain the source code. CodePlex's terms to submit a project states that a project must publish source code. After spending some time evaluating options to either publish the source code on CodePlex or to move the project to MSDN Code Gallery, Anand Raman. After all the feedback that was received from the community Anand decided that publishing the source code was the right thing to do. Yesterday afternoon the announcement was made that the source was published to the CodePlex project. It is published under the Microsoft Public License.

I think this is great. Sandcastle is a great tool and was much needed after the demise of NDoc. I can't wait to see where this project goes in the future.

With the release of the XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP, I thought I would give it a shot at seeing what exactly can be developed for the Zune. I am in no way a game developer, nor do I have an urge to be one, but I would like to see if some non-game applications can be developed and deployed on the Zune. I downloaded the CTP that was announced the other day and followed any steps mentioned in the readme and the Zune Game Development FAQ.

The setup process went smooth enough and no problems during the install. I installed on Windows Vista Business x86. I had Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite installed before I ran the XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP installer.

After installation completed, I fired up Visual Studio and selected ZuneGame (3.0) for the project type, set where I wanted to save the solution and clicked OK. I almost immediately received a message box that had a message like the following:



Update: This is a screenshot of the exact message box that appears, minus the username removed from the path.

After the message box appears, the solution opens but there are no projects in the solution and in the directory the file does not exist. I have tried uninstalling and starting over, running the devenv switches to reset the settings and re-setup Visual Studio, and Nothing seems to have corrected the message.

I have searched far and wide for a solution to this problem and have only been able to find this issue relating to beta versions of WPF for Visual Studio 2005. Any thing that I have tried, like running devenv /setup, has not worked. If I do come across an answer to this, I will post the solution because I can not be the only one that encountered this.

Microsoft released an update to their zune software and hardware today which brings the version to 2.5. This update brings TV shows to the Zune Marketplace. It also adds a more of a social aspect to the software by being able to see what your friends are listening too. You can also share your Zune Card which is sort of like an XBox LIVE gamer card. I wonder if the update has anything to do with the XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP release.

Me wanting to know what information I could actually get out of the Zune data that is sent to the software, I loaded up WireShark. Seems there is (at least for now) an undocumented API to get this information all starting at http://socialapi.zune.net.

There are a few different types of information I was able to get by digging around:

• User Info: /members/<zunetag|id>/
  • This gets the following information
    • The users Zune ID (a guid)
    • Zune tag (mine is Darth Minos, the same as my XBox LIVE)
    • Last time updated
    • A url to a users friends Atom feed (see below)
    • The number of plays
    • Profile info like: display name, status, location
    • A url for a users profile image
    • A url to a users Zune Card background
      
    • A url to RecentTracks Atom feed
    • A url to MostPlayedArtists Atom feed
    • A url to FavoriteTracks Atom feed
    • Possibly other playlists as well but I have not been able to confirm that yet.
      
• Friends List: /members/<zunetag|id>/friends
  • This Atom feed contains the same info as above but for multiple users
•  Playlist: /members<zunetag|id>/playlists/<playlist-name>
  • Contains multiple tracks that are in the playlist with the following information:
    • Track Title
    • Track ID (probably used to link to it in the marketplace
    • A "Sort Title"
    • Track Length
    • Track #
    • Disc #
    • Play rank
    • If the track contains explicit lyrics
    • primary artist info like name and an ID
    • Album title and ID
    • media Instance ID (for marketplace?)
    • provider and provider code (for marketplace?)
    • offer ID (for marketplace?)
    • offer instance id (for marketplace?)
    • points price (for marketplace)
    • a license type
      
    • audio encoding (i think this is the encoding of the file that can be bought in the marketplace)

That is really all i have found so far. If anyone finds out any other feeds that are available drop me a line or a comment here.

The latest release for the CC.NET Community Plugins has support for an FTP Source Control. This source control provider works a lot like the FileSystemSourceControl, except it gets the source from an FTP server. Modifications are determined based on the date of the file on the server.

The RssBuildsPublisher and CodePlexReleasePublisher have also been added to the project. With the addition of these publishers, it adds the ability to support macros for the values of the objects via a Macro Engine. Currently, only these publishers support macros, but others will gain support in future releases.

The macro engine allows, when configured, values to come from properties of the Integration Result object, the object being invoked (a CodePlexReleasePublisher for example), a value generated from a macro method, or from the Result xml.

Properties are called by using $(PropertyName) format. If the property exists, the string will be replaced with the actual value, otherwise, it will output the original $(PropertyName) string.

Macros are called using @{MacroMethodName(arg1,arg2,...argN)}. Arguments are passed to the method as a string and it is the responsibility of the Macro Method to parse out the arguments and check for validity. The macro engine will dynamically load external macros in to the engine. A macro must implement the IMacro namespace and the assembly name must match the ccp.*.macro.dll format. Multiple macros can reside in an assembly, and as long as the assembly name matches the pattern, they will be available for use.

The final way to get dynamic values is from the Integration Task Results Xml. This is done by using the !(/xpath/here) format. The xpath must be valid XPath and must select a node that has a value.