Tail Recursive

Recently, I’ve started playing around with a technology called Second Life. For those of you who have not heard of it (I hadn’t until last year sometime), it’s a virtual reality program that connects you to a mess of servers owned by a San Francisco company called Linden Labs. Second Life is a 3D world you can wander around in and interact with. There are also a whole mess of other people in there that you can meet and interact with as well. Second Life is at once a game, a chat tool, a collaboration engine, and a place for commerce… with a healthy (or unhealthy, depending upon your attitude) mixture of the Wild West added to the pot. And, when I say “Wild West,” I mean gun slingers, saloons, and whores, yes (well, the 21st century equivalent, I suppose… the gun slingers don’t really use guns so much as scripts that fling people about, the saloons are dance clubs, and the whores are… well… whores).

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It’s been a while since I posted last, and that’s mainly because I haven’t been doing anything interesting. I have been playing around with a couple of software packages which might be of interest.

First, a little while ago, Microsoft brought out a free version of Visual Studio, called Visual Studio Express. C#, C++, J#, and Visual Basic are available, as is an express edition of SQL Server. Now, I’m no fan of Microsoft, but Visual Studio 2005 and .NET are considerably less horrible than some of their old tools (oh, the agony of trying to write robust code in Visual Basic 6!). The express editions are, as you might expect, considerably less full-featured than their professional counter-parts; but they are certainly good enough for students, hobbyists, or just plain messing about. So, if you’ve been thinking you need to learn C# but didn’t want to pay for the full package, this might be a good way to go.

Along the same lines, Microsoft has also released a beta of a simplified game development environment called XNA Game Studio Express. This package plugs into the Visual Studio Express package and allows the student or hobbyist to write games fairly easily using .NET and DirectX. Currently, the games only play under Windows, but they claim the games will be able to run on the XBox 360 by the time the software is finalized. I haven’t played with this last package very much yet, but I can say that what I’ve seen so far would make it relatively easy to build some simple games. You won’t be writing the next Halo using this, but you could still write something pretty neat.

Both of these moves represent something of a shift for Microsoft, I think. It used to be that, except for something like QBasic in the bad old days of DOS, there really was no free software from Microsoft for development. Their tools were always good, but you had to pay for them (and in the case of the professional and enterprise packages, the price could be steep). Now, you can get a decent version of a C# IDE without spending a dime, and you get a game development package for free too. In both cases, Microsoft is lowering the barrier to entry to learning how to work with their tools and libraries. Considering that there are numerous free tools available (Sun’s JDK, the GNU suite, and a plethora of free implementations of various programming languages like Squeak [a personal favorite], Scheme, Common Lisp, etc.), this is a pretty smart move. Now, if you want to learn how to work with the Microsoft stack of software and don’t have a lot of money to spend, there is a path for you where there might not have been one before.