Microsoft announced the new XNA Game Studio Express Development Enviroment today. If you don't know much about the XNA Framework yet, check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/

As you can see from the URL XNA has something to do with DirectX. It is not really the next version, because XNA only uses DirectX 9.0c right now and Direct3D 10 will come with Vista and allow more advanced shader features. But XNA is a big step into crossplatform development and making it easy for everyone to develop XBox 360 games.

As Tom Miller pointed out the press release is out and many sites have covered it already, read all these stories here. I won't repeat all these news stories, but basically everyone is excited and happy to see that everyone can now try to make XBox 360 games with help of the XNA Framework. David Weller will do some talks about XNA Game Studio on the Microsoft Gamefest Conference today, we will know more details in a day or two. It will also be announced at the keynote in a few hours, when even more sites will report on XNA :-)

You can read on the XNA site: "A beta of XNA Game Studio Express will be released on August 30, 2006. To receive a notification when the Beta is available, please go to http://connect.microsoft.com and select "Available Connections." Then choose the XNA connection and follow the link to sign up for the XNA Game Studio Express Beta."
This means you can try out XNA Studio shortly and check out many of the great new features. XNA is kinda the successor of MDX 2.0, which was never released (it reached only beta state). XNA will be programmed in c# (I told ya, ok, I didn't, but it is still great). You will also have new tools available at your disposal like a solid content management pipeline. This means you can now immediately drop your content files (textures, models) in their native format (whatever is supported, dunno yet, great would be .max or .psd files) into your project and all associated textures and model data is extracted and can be used directly in your game.

More on XNA in a couple of days, dunno what I can say yet and what I can't, so lets wait :) I will certainly take an early look at XNA Framework and give you guys some code, examples and maybe even games (is that a hint, no way, I didn't say anything, arg, stop talking, ...)

Other Updates:

• AppTrafficMonitorLite and AbiTrafficMonitor are now merged together. Instead of developing the same features in AbiTrafficMonitor again, I just imported everything from the old tool. AbiTrafficMonitor runs much more stable than the old version.
  
      Download AbiTrafficMonitor v1.2 here.
  
  
• I updated my CR_Commenter plugin. It is now tested with CodeRush 2.0 and the installer uses the correct 2.0 directory now. More about CR_Commenter v1.7 can be found in this post.
  
      Download CR_Commenter v1.7 here.
  
  

A couple of days back I made a blog post about Top 10 tools and included my version of the AppTrafficMonitorLite Tool, which is nice, but does not run very stable (crashes after a while). I couldn't figure out why this happens because the debugger only tells me that some unmanaged gdi stuff crashes (at random memory locations, thats fun).

Instead of analysing and fixing that tool forever while most of the code was not done by me and it is not structurized in a easy way, I decided to write a completly new tool to do the job. It is still based on the great SharpPcap library, which brings WinPcap to .NET. It will not support as many features and I will only implement stuff as I need it ^^

The most important features for me are the autoupdating traffic tray icon and the current and total traffic. More features will come in the detail window later, we are still at version 0.1. The detail window will show all current packages that go through your computer, all the application details and additional information and statistics about all network adapters.

Here is the download link:

Click here to download AbiTrafficMonitor.exe v0.1 (160 KB)

Update 2006-08-08: Fixed the increasing GDI handles bug (still caused crashes after several hours), now it runs REALLY stable :)

Here is a little info about this issue. This was the old code:

    // Set the new icon
    notifyIcon1.Icon = Icon.FromHandle(updatedIconBmp.GetHicon());

Looks ok, but with the help of ProcessExplorer I found out that this lines creates 3 new GDI handles and never releases it. I thought maybe something is wrong with GetHicon generating the bitmap, but that didn't cause it. So it must have something to do with the Icon.FromHandle method. I even tried out implementing the icon with Interop calls, but always as I set the new icon to the notify icon I got 3 new GDI handles, ARG! Finally I thought that the problem may not be in the Icon class, but in the NotifyIcon class and how the new Icon is applied. And thats exactly where the problem is. The Icon set property does not just assign the Icon, it does create a copy and manages the icon itself. So the only thing you have to do after assigning a Icon is to destroy it again (since NotifyIcon keeps its own copy):

    // Create new icon
    Icon newIcon = Icon.FromHandle(updatedIconBmp.GetHicon());

    // Set the new icon
    notifyIcon1.Icon = newIcon;

    // Destroy the icon, since the NotifyIcon keeps its own copy of the icon.
    // Note: This was the GDI memory leak before, is fixed now!
    DestroyIcon(newIcon.Handle);

[...]

    [DllImport("user32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto)]
    extern static bool DestroyIcon(IntPtr handle);

I've updated my CR_Commenter Visual Studio plugin for CodeRush a little. Click here for full details about this plugin.

Basically regions and parameters were improved a lot and some minor fixes were done. Little shoutout to Judge Rico for testing and comments. Here are the full details for CR_Commenter Version 1.7:

• New feature: Generating comments will not longer expand any collapsed regions, at whichever file position we are. This means if you generate comments for a whole file, all collapsed regions will be collapsed again after everything was modified.
• New feature: Autosorting feature for using directives, also fixed couple of using issues.
• Example:
• using abc;
• using xc;
• using Honk = xc.Honk;
  
• using bbb;
  
• becomes:
• #region Using directives
  
• using abc;
• using bbb;
• using xc;
  
• using Honk = xc.Honk;
• #endregion
  
• New feature: Parameter comment generating works now always, no matter if you add or remove parameters. This is a quite useful feature, even refactoring parameters is supported (moving, removing, adding stuff).
• Bugfix: Long comment lines got now properly cut off (doesn't go over 80 anymore)
• Bugfix: Fixed autogenerating header when user modified or shortened it
• Improved hotkeys a little:
• Ctrl+1: Does perform the same action as closing a block with '}', but can be used anywhere inside a method or class.
• Ctrl+2 or Ctrl+.: Adds a namespace for the current word at the cursor. Used to support automatically adding a namespace in C# 3.0
• Ctrl+3: Autogenerate region around the current block (method, property, constructor, etc.), for selections use Ctrl+R.
• Ctrl+4: Toggle collapsing and expanding current selection.
• Ctrl+5: Toggle collapsing and expanding everything at top level (also supports sub regions).
• Ctrl+6 or Ctrl+F9: Update all comments and xml blocks for the whole file.

The only thing on my wishlist still missing from CR_Commenter is automatically generating all regions for a file at once (fields, properties, constructors, methods, etc.). This will be quite a lot of work to implement and test it, maybe this feature comes in v1.8. Some tools require constant attention and you can always pump new ideas in it. Other tools like NormalMapCompressor never need a update except some bugfixes ^^

Here are the download links:

Click here to download CR_Commenter.zip v1.7
And here is the sourcecode for CR_Commenter v1.7