After the Last Stand

May the road rise to meet you...When the XNA-fuelled fireworks were over at yesterday's Last Stand in Dublin (literally and figuratively) I was totally lost for words. When does that ever happen?!

What I really want to say most is thank you - especially to
Clare Dillon, Philip McKeown, Fergal Breen and everyone else at
Microsoft, MTUG, IrishDev and beyond who made my time with the Ireland
developer communities so enjoyable. I love the communities because you
guys WANT to be there and so it makes it worth my while to shower you with my honest (boundless?) enthusiasm.

And thank you so much for letting me keep the Lego Mindstorms
NXT kit! (!!!) I promise you it will be well looked after and is
staying in a loving home where it will get all the attention it
deserves. And Siofra and I may have to share the table between mosaics
and Lego from now on :)

You probably could tell, I really enjoyed the chance to pull out all the stops and show you what I've been up to.

Just like the guy who forgets that his glasses are on his forehead,
I forgot that my speaker notes were in my pocket. There were about 4
other things about XNA and Robotics Studio I forgot to show you
yesterday... but those all are for another story, except this one thing:

With the XNA 1.0 Refresh, it takes just one step to package up your
games (code+content) to distribute as an install for Windows and
XBox360! At present, you need to be a XNA Creators Club member to play
the XBox versions, but the Windows ones are good to go for free.

So if I can have the permission of the inimitable Phil McDarby
to distribute the beautiful background image behind the fireworks, I'll
take my Guitar Hero XPlorer-controlled finale, pack it up, and you can
all answer Ireland's Call with your Guitar Hero controllers any time
you want, even when Ireland aren't playing rugby at Croker.

p.s. what are you doing here?!  My new blog is here!