On Wednesday NNUG Bergen was lucky enough to get Einar Ingebrigtsen to speak for us. He held a great session about XNA and some game dev history. Einar did game development for about 8 years and then jumped to business development. His background was perfect to highlight some of the similarities between the two. Especially interesting was the similarities around layering.

Einar is involved in many things and one of his latest projects is Game Camp. On November 23rd Game Camp will kick off with a great agenda in Oslo. Go here to check out the agenda and registration.

Another thing Einar has been doing lately is creating a 3D engine for Silverlight called Balder. As you may know Silverlight is a subset of WPF and one of the things they removed was the 3D stuff. But that didn’t stop him. Check out his 3D project over at CodePlex. To see the engine in action, check out this demo.

Just saw that there was a new episode (Silverlight) of The .Net Show out, and it started with telling us that this is the last episode! I've been watching this show on and off since its startup in December 1999! The show has been running for almost 8 years which makes this the longest running series at Microsoft. However, all good things have to come to an end. But it’s sad. I’ve really enjoyed this show and for a time (before blogging and rss) it was one of my few sources to new .Net technology inside the walls of Microsoft. Robert Hess’s (the host) last words in the show were:

“Well, until next time, we'll see you on the Web and I might recommend you check out channel9.msdn.com. You never know who you might see show up there.”

So I guess this isn’t the last time we see Robert. Thanks for all your hard work on this show during the years, giving us the latest news and insight into .Net technology! Salute!

Just found a Silverlight game that uses Virtual Earth as a backdrop for a helicopter chasing alien invaders. Check out the game here: http://www.andybeaulieu.com/silverlight/DestroyAll/Default.html

Want to hack yourself? You'll find the source for the game here: http://www.andybeaulieu.com/Home/tabid/67/EntryID/75/Default.aspx

The game is created by Andy Beaulieu.

First thing I thought about when I heard about WPF/E was that it's Microsoft's answer to Flash. Nothing wrong with that, but now when I saw the official name I thought the exact same thing! Silverlight, Flash, silverlight, flash.... Hmmmm... Just another name for flash :) I wonder if this was what they meant. At least they didn't end up with Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation for Extreme Internet Graphical User Interface (MWPFEIGUI) or something like that. Guess they saw the blog post over at Secret Geek. Anyway, I'm looking forward to do some real coding on Silverlight and for the record; here are the official Silverlight page.

Update: For more info about Silverlight, check out Mary Jo Foley's blog post.