Things I like this week

1. Visual Studio, C Sharp, and the XNA framework. I’ve used Visual Studio before. I know it’s good. I’ve known this for a while. But I guess it’s been a while since I’ve done much in it. And over the last few years I’ve used all kinds of programming IDEs and seen the strengths and weaknesses of them all. Same with C Sharp. I’ve used it, liked it, drifted away and been doing several other languages in the meantime. XNA, though, is brand new to me. The combination of these three things is programming nirvana.

Visual Studio’s tooling is almost clairvoyant. It knows what I want to type almost before I type it. Actually, it’s not so much that it does anything all that amazing. Everything it does is pretty much what you want an IDE to do. It’s the reason you use and IDE and don’t just code in notepad / textedit. But Visual Studio … JUST … GETS … IT … RIGHT. Other IDEs to pretty much the same stuff – except when they don’t, which is all too often. VS just has a lot of little things that click together that makes life easy while coding. Also, there’s a surprising simplicity to it. I’ve worked with mostly Eclipse and XCode over the last few years, and although I feel I’ve come to “master” both of those environments at least to the degree that I needed to for my own purposes, I still find both very complex, confusing, and cluttered. XCode 4 is trying to change things up, and while it definitely has made some good steps towards the goal of simplicity, I still feel like it’s a mess. When I look at Visual Studio though, I feel a sense of simplicity and almost miinimalism. It is actually more in line with what I would expect Apple to design as a coding environment.

A brief word on C Sharp. You already know it’s a cool language. Although I’ve hardly touched it over the last couple of years, after 5 minutes, I feel completely comfortable with it. It took me longer than that to get back in the Objective-C groove after just a few months away.

And the XNA framework is amazing. Every time I read a bit of the documenation on another class, I get genuinely excited and have to drop what I’m doing and code. Twice this week I’ve brought my PC to work with me, even though I’m coding on a Mac at work, so that I could write code on the train. I haven’t done that in ages.

2. OK, don’t laugh… I bought a Zune HD yesterday!

I know, I know, but you know what? It’s a freaking AWESOME media player! Very slick UI and some great features. The Zune desktop software is pretty weird – it breaks pretty much every paradigm of any media center software I’ve ever seen. But once you get a feel for the UI and what is where, it’s very capable and integrates very tightly with the device. Far more so than even iTunes and your iDevice. For example, wired or wireless syncing! And amazingly tight 2-way syncing. I was listening to a podcast on the device, got home, synced wirelessly, then started up the podcast on my pc. It started playing exactly where I’d left off on the device! That took me for suprise.

Also, it seems much less restrictive about what kind of media you can put on it. I’ve copied over various types of videos and it played them all without a hitch. Not so with iDevices, which take a fair bit of hand converting in most cases, in my experience.

Size-wise it’s in betwen an iPod touch and a fourth gen iPod Nano. And probably falls into the same slot in terms of features and price. It has wifi, no camera, an app marketplace with about a dozen or so free apps and games. Although you can code and deploy Zune apps with XNA 3.1 software, there is no way to sell and distribute them. I think MS dropped that whole line to focus on WP7. But I hear there will be some Zune software updates in the near future, so who knows.

But honestly, I don’t miss the apps. I love my Kindle because when I sit down to read with it, that’s all I can do with it, thus I actually read. I feel the same thing with the Zune. It’s made for media, mainly audio, and it excels at that. I guess I’ve become a bit disillusioned with the whole convergence thing. I am getting into the purpose built devices these days. Yeah, it’s more devices to carry around, but I don’t mind. I’m not going to try to convince you of the correctness of my ways, so feel free to disagree, and likewise don’t preach to me. 🙂

Long story short, I really, really, really like this Zune!