Category Archives: Rock Band

Tulsa TechFest Wrap Up

This past Thursday and Friday, the Tulsa TechFest was held at OSU Tulsa in Tulsa (could I write Tulsa one more time, I knew I could). Attendance was high and most of the sessions I attended were in rooms full of people. The day started off early Thursday morning, but that’s not the start of the story.

The night before, Dru and Rob came by the house for a little pre-conference warmup (and by warmup, I don’t mean this). Rob went through his presentation on continuous integration one last time while Dru and I worked through our presentation on messaging (and how to do it with MassTransit, of course). The night ended early for me, but Rob and Dru met up with Ben at the hotel and closed the bar (and by closed, I mean walked in at last call and got one beer).

The next morning we all met up and caught up on things since the last gathering. Since the last time we saw Ben, he’d been through a hurricane and granted the MVP Award from Microsoft. We then planned out our day of sessions based on the information currently available to us.

The speaker for the CSS talk was unable to attend, so the four of us convened an open-space session on CSS. The discussion in the fishbowl was good with a lot of interesting topics. Ben gave an on-screen demonstration of CSS from the ground up for those in the room that were new to it, providing context for the audience. CSS is extremely important considering it is the best (only?) way to layout and style websites consistently across browsers. I think everyone brought up how much of a turd IE 6 is when it comes to CSS compatibility.

After lunch, it was time for Dru and I to present our session on message-driven architecture (using MassTransit). You can see the first hour of the session on video here. The crowd really got into it, asked a lot of questions, and hopefully came away with an understanding of asynchronous application design and messaging.

After that session, we sat down with a guy that works for Sun and talked about enterprise application architecture. It was interesting comparing the mature open-source nature of Java to the budding open-source landspace in .NET. After the closing session and prize giveaway, there was a speakers dinner (Rib Crib, good stuff). Once we had eaten, we went to the hotel and did a little code sharing and Dru and Ben went through ASP.NET MVC some more. Then we went over to Dirty’s Tavern for some post-day fun. I was worn out, so I went back to my car and called it a night.

The next day was full of interesting stuff. A nice introduction to ASP.NET MVC by Ben, some extensive coverage of log4net by Dru, and I gave a presentation on iPhone development. Outside of the actual sessions there were a lot of great conversations about development and tools in general. We also recorded Ray Lewallen’s session on Behavior Driven Development, which can be viewed here.

My iPhone development session was purely introductory to show the tools and how they are used to build and deliver applications for the iPhone. The room was absolutely packed and hopefully everyone walked away with some good information. I know at least one guy did, he left two seconds after I said that building iPhone applications requires a Mac!

To wrap it up, the event was a huge success. There were a ton of people there, the vendor room was always alive with activity (likely due to Chris Koenig and his Rock Band setup giving some much needed ADHD relief between sessions). Chris also had a couple of great sessions on Silverlight and the new features in 2.0 that should really improve the use of Silverlight for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

Rock Band Guitar Issues

Well, my first Rock Band guitar has already been replaced by Activision. The exchange was super fast (got the new guitar in three days) and the new one seems to be working much better. The flaw == a broken strummer. And it wasn’t just me!

The lame thing of the day is that I fired up Guitar Hero 3 on the XBOX and was surprised to see that I cannot use my Rock Band controller with GH3. So no multiplayer GH3 without another GH3 controller. That, IMHO, is completely lame. Patch that crap and make it all work together nicely. What a load of crap.

Other than that, the family loves Rock Band. We had some younger family members (under 18) over tonight and they all had a blast with all four parts being represented. I was glad to provide some entertainment while they entertained me (failing on easy? puh-leeez!).

And for what it’s worth, I’m completely screwed trying to finish Vaseline on Hard in Rock Band — yeah, I guess I suck that badly.

Rock Band In The House

After my last post where I mentioned that I got to play Rock Band at the Tulsa InstallFest, I joked about an XBOX 360 being in my near future. Well, I guess I wasn’t joking after all. At first I thought I would have no problem waiting until after Christmas. Most of the places I checked were out of stock and it looked like the must have video game for 2007 was out of reach. Then I called my buddy Jason at GameSpot and was told that they had a couple of them left.

It was a bit sad trading in my only PS2 games for Rock Band. As I laid my games out on the counter, Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero II, Guitar Hero Encore: 80′s, and Guitar Hero III, I felt a sadness in my heart. I had spent hours upon hours working hard to finish all those songs. Numerous parties where we laughed at each other after failing at an attempt to finish Freebird on Expert. Ah, good times.

Then there was the real issue — I didn’t own an XBOX 360. But I wanted to play the game. Thanks to that good old “no preset spending limit” on the American Express, I ended up taking one of those home as well. I guess I knew the cost going in, but didn’t really think it would go that far. Oh well, such is the life of a video game junkie. Having won a cool new Bluetooth mouse and a 4GB Zune at the InstallFest, I was feeling the need for frugality.

But Rock Band is really that good. Having played Guitar Hero for nearly two years, the guitar parts on Rock Band aren’t too different and don’t seem to hard. But the drums are in another league. I have never been a drummer and I find the added coordination of feet and hands to be intense. It’s going to take some time before I can get past easy on drums. I don’t even want to mention my first attempt at singing vocals but getting an okay on the first song in each (Hey, Ho, Let’s Go) really doesn’t give me much hope of ever being a vocalist.

I had just finished Guitar Hero III on medium this past weekend, so I was a bit bummed that I would have to play all those songs again once I pick it up for the 360. But given the enormous collection of online downloads that are available, I think I’ll get over it. The PS2 was so limited when it came to downloadable content that it didn’t hurt too bad to bid it farewell. When I think about it, it’s probably the oldest piece of technology in my house next to the clock in our microwave oven.

My Gamertag in XBOX Live is ChrisFromTulsa if you want to play online sometime!

Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest in Tulsa

Tonight was the Tulsa installment of the Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest that is sweeping the cities this month. In a move to get people excited about VS2008, Microsoft handed out 150 trial copies of VS2008 to those that registered. As an encouragement to those that installed VS two-double-oght-eight on site, participants who demonstrated the post-install goodness were given a t-shirt to commemorate the event.

This was by far the biggest turn out we’ve had outside of Tulsa TechFest at OSU Tulsa. Tons of food and drink were provided, including Mazzio’s Pizza, Domino’s Pizza, and Spaghetti Warehouse pasta trays. There was plenty to go around and everyone was talking and discussing anything and everything. Good times.

Once we arrived, we camped out and provided the entertainment for the room. Chris Koenig provided several XBOX 360′s for the event, one with Guitar Hero III and another with my new favorite game Rock Band. Rock Band absolutely kicks ass. We had 3-4 players all the time, and I even uploaded a few videos of people playing the game. The multiplayer on Rock Band makes the battle mode on GH3 look lame. Having a group playing all parts of the song is more fun than you could imagine based on the videos on the web.

These videos were shot on my MacBook Pro and uploaded at the event using iMovie’s YouTube export:

Needless to say, I’ll likely be getting an XBOX 360 and Rock Band sometime in the near future!