I received my first copy of the book on Friday afternoon and it looks great!  It is now also listed as “In Stock” on Amazon.  Additionally, there is now a Google Preview of the book If you’d like to see a preview of the book, you can do so by clicking the Google Preview link below, or navigating directly to the Google Book Search page for this book.

We have also been busy updating the book’s main site, www.c4fbook.com, with source code, color images, project links, etc.  It’s not complete, but we should have it wrapped up in the next few days.

I can’t think of a better holiday gift for the geek in your family than this, but, I may be a bit biased…

Several friends and I work together to write “indie” video games under the brand Ganksoft Entertainment.  You may recall that for Maker Faire 2007, we created a very simple rhythm-based music game (think Rock Band or Dance Dance Revolution) using XNA called Head Banger.

With Microsoft’s official release of Xbox LIVE Community Games with the New Xbox Experience, we decided to blow the dust off of Head Banger, add a couple songs, integrate it bit more with Community Games and XNA 3.0 and release it.  It is now available for purchase for 200 Microsoft Points (or, as with all Arcade and Community games, there’s a free trial) straight from the Community Games section of the Games Marketplace on your Xbox 360.  It will be listed under New Releases for a little while, otherwise you can go to All Games and then the letter H to find it.  Additionally, you can view the official Marketplace page on the new web-based Xbox LIVE Marketplace site.

Please give the trial a go and …

I’ll be presenting a session on building your own holiday musical light show using Phidget boards and .NET at this month’s Tech Valley User Group.  I’ve previously written an article about this topic on the Coding4Fun site, and there will be a full chapter on this in our upcoming “Coding4Fun: 10 .NET Programming Projects for Wiimote, YouTube, World of Warcraft, and More” book.  Here are the session details…

Hope to see you at the session!

I previously talked about my WiiEarthVR project shown at PDC project, and now I have posted the article for the application up at the Coding4Fun site.  Full source code is available.  You’ll need some hardware to make this go, namely a Wiimote, Nunchuk, Wii Fit Balance Board and a pair of Vuzix VR920 glasses, but the hardware can be toggled on or off depending on your own setup.  The VR920 glasses are pretty cool in that they also work with a variety of FPS games on your PC with a custom driver they include.

The article will, among other things, teach you how to use Virtual Earth 3D from a managed host (i.e. a WinForms app, not a web page), how to talk to the Wiimote, Nunchuk and Wii Fit Balance Board, how to retrieve the head tracking data from the VR920 glasses from .NET, and how to draw stereoscopic 3D images to the VR920 glasses from .NET.  Quite a bit packed in there…

Anyway, have a read and, as always, questions and comments are welcome.

A new version of my managed Wiimote library for .NET has been released.  You can find version 1.6 up at CodePlex now.  The changes are as follows:

v1.6.0.0

• Added "center of gravity" calculation to the Wii Fit Balance Board (thanks to Steven Battersby)
• Structs are now marked [Serializable] (suggested by Caio)
• Battery property is now a float containing the calculated percentage of battery remaining
• BatteryRaw is the byte value that used to be stored in the Battery property
• WiimoteTest app now reads extensions properly when inserted at startup
• Exposed HID device path in new HIDDevicePath property on Wiimote object
• Changed the time delay on writes to 50ms from 100ms...this should improve responsiveness of setting LEDs and rumble

I feel like I’m running out of things to implement and bugs to fix.  I know that’s not true.  So, I want to hear from the people using my library…

What features/bugs do you want to see …