Michael Klucher's Blog

As I write this post it’s still the first week of the new year and while we’re still a thousand years off from living in a world of Laser Tag, I’m quite reminiscent of the previous year and even more excited for the year to come.

The last month of 2009 was a bit weird for me. I was out of the office for most of it due to some surgery I was having (more on that some other time) but December 2009 also marks the first month since we started shipping XNA Game Studio, known as XNA Game Studio Express at the time, that we haven’t shipped a new major version. So what is usually a very busy month getting everything ready to ship to customers, turned out to be a low-key month.

We haven’t been asleep at the wheel though, as I mentioned in my previous post we’ve been hard at work throughout all of 2009. Looking back we had a fair share of releases with XNA Game Studio 3.1 which had some great additional features and the XNA Game Studio 3.1 Zune Extensions for the Zune HD. The year also brought us several new team members, including Zach who is already a better game developer than I could ever be

Moving forward I think 2010 is going to be even better for XNA Game Studio users! 2010 is also starting off to be a really busy year for the team, take a look at some of the events we have lined up for you right around the corner!

• January through May we’ll be hosting our Developer Talk Series of Webcasts through http://creators.xna.com on various XNA Game Studio topics with several members of the XNA Development Platform team.
• February 10th and 11th(My B-Day!) we’ll be hosting Microsoft Gamefest 2010 with some great sessions on XNA Game Studio and other Microsoft game development technologies, including Project Natal!
• February 16th through February 19th is the Microsoft 2010 MVP Global Summit for both or existing and new XNA/DirectX MVP’s! Congratulations to everyone who was recently nominated or renewed!
• March 9th through March 13th marks GDC 2010. We don’t have our formal agenda set in stone yet but we’ll have plenty of sessions and other great stuff for you to enjoy!

That’s quite a few events to have planned out so early in the year. Of course these aren’t the only things we have planned for XNA Game Studio in 2010, we may have a few additional surprises up our sleeve! If nothing else you’ll learn at some point what my developer session topic will be as opposed to the ominous "TBD". While it’s busy, it’s also a productive way to kickoff the new year and I hope to see you at at least some of the events above!

On that note, here’s to a great 2009 and wishing all of you a happy and exciting 2010!

It took a bit of time, but with some work over the holidays I’ve finally gotten my blog updated and rocking a pretty nice theme! While I really wanted to stick with a .NET engine, I ended up using Wordpress because it has a lot of themes and some great plug-ins. I also caught them during the PDC keynote so it made me feel even better!

I also took the opportunity to move to IIS7 and the upgrade seems to have gone without a hitch. You’ll also find that all the posts were migrated over thanks to the great post over at JefTek. If you see any problems with them, please drop me a comment and let me know!

So what does this mean? I hope that 2010 will bring some more frequent postings from me  now that I can blog without trying to keep the site constantly running correctly or working around theme issues! The upgrade caused one minor shortfall in that if you use RSS to read my blog you’ll now want to point to http://klucher.com/feed as opposed to the old URL. I realize the irony in that those who only use RSS to read my blog may not see this for a while. If you do catch this please help spread the word, it would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks and I’ll be posting more very soon!