We finally have an official cover!  This is likely exciting to no one but me (and Dan)…

Dan and I are working on the very final round of edits and formatting.  The book goes to the printer next week and it should be available the first week of December according to Amazon.  So what are you waiting for?  Order now!  :)

And be sure to visit our book’s website.  The chapter items will be filled in as we near the official release so you can get a head start on the book’s content.

While at PDC2008 we shot an episode of This Week on Channel 9.  If you feel the need to waste 13 minutes of your life on a PDC recap with me, Dan Fernandez, Scott Hanselman and Clint Rutkas, then this is the video for you.  I have embedded the video below, but you can also click through to the main page to watch or download the video in a variety of formats.

Read More

Well, PDC2008 is over.  I had a lot of fun, met a ton of interesting and fun people, and learned about a lot of exciting new technologies.  I hope to make it back out there next year.

Our PDC2008 session video has been posted up at Channel 9 along with the PowerPoint slide deck.  In this session you will learn about four of our current projects:  WiiEarthVR by myself, InnerTube by Dan Fernandez, TwitterVote by Clint Rutkas and BabySmash by Scott Hanselman.

If you’d like to check out the video, you can watch it “live” or download the deck and video in various formats with the following links:

• Channel 9 session page with video and slides
• WMV-HD
• WMV (not HD)
• Zune
• PowerPoint deck

Source code for all projects will be available soon and I’ll provide an update when it’s available.  WiiEarthVR will also have its own Coding4Fun article within a week or two.  InnerTube and TwitterVote are also featured in depth in our new book, “Coding4Fun: 10 …

Update: Looks like the link has expired since PDC is now over.  Thanks to all who downloaded!

At PDC2008 we have been giving away printouts of our first chapter and table of contents for our new book, “Coding4Fun: 10 .NET Programming Projects for Wiimote, YouTube, World of Warcraft, and More” to anyone who drops by the Coding4Fun area.  We ran out of copies early today, so for those of you at PDC (and anyone else for that matter) that’s interested in taking a look at the (not really properly formatted in all places) first chapter of the book in PDF format, you can do so by visiting http://oreilly.com/go/mspdc .  This chapter covers how to build a simple 2D game named Alien Attack using XNA 3.0.

This link will die within the next few days, so download soon.  Any questions and comments are welcome, as always…enjoy!

Update 1/20/09: Here’s a vid from Channel9 showing the WiiEarthVR project:

Time to talk a little bit about my PDC demo…

About a year ago, I wrote an application to control Virtual Earth 3D with the Wiimote named WiiEarth and a corresponding Coding4Fun articleon how it was done.  Since that time VE3D has been updated several times and code changes have broken my application.  Since their API is undocumented and unsupported, it was bound to happen.

For PDC this year, I decided to write a new version of WiiEarth, now named WiiEarthVR, using the Wiimote and some additional hardware, namely the Wii Fit Balance Board and a pair of Vuzix VR920 glasses.  Using the Balance Board, the user can shift their center of gravity (i.e. lean) and control the VE3D environment as if they were on a hovering glider.

The VR920 glasses contain sensors to allow head tracking in 3 degrees of freedom.  A very simple API provides a way to determine the yaw, pitch and …