Productive Day with SBS 2008 and also some XNA
Saturday, August 01 2009 - sbs-2008, xna
Today I thought I would start to catch up with some projects that I have let drag.
Small Business Server 2008 Migration.
The first is my Small Business 2008 Server, I have been trying to migrate to it for a long while and have finally kicked the migration off. The server has been built for a while and has been ready to go but I wanted to play around and set some stuff up before I swapped over. As of 10 minutes ago I have now finalized the updates of the Operating System and configured all of the networking, this includes having all of the access from the outside world configured and running. The Backup of the system has been running strong for a good couple of weeks and today I did some test restores of the Exchange, Database and File System.
The only thing left to do now is to start to migrate the user data from the old 2003 server to the new 2008 server. I do not think this is going to take long, but I want to make sure that I do not take any of the rubbish from the old server to the new. So it looks like the next stage is a small task of data cleansing, time to get some Powershell scripts put together (Learning exercise as well).
Over the last few years I have been working with the Game State Sample as a base for a framework for the games and applications that I have been developing, At one point I even did some work with another community member and released the code on Codeplex. With having a forces holiday from work over the last almost 3 weeks I decided to dig out the code and start working on the framework again. After looking at the two samples (Game State and Network State) I started playing with the idea of merging them together. Last night I completed the small task of putting them into the one project and have started to change the layout of the code and classes to match a format that I like, this included adding several game components that I use with my apps as well as upgrading the code to use the XNA 3.1 Framework.
So now I have a framework based of the Network State Sample that has the full options menus added, I have also changed the menu structure so that if I wanted to only release a single player game a simple change in the game constants class would turn those menus off. I have also changed the fonts used in the game to use the fonts that are supplied from the Creators Site (Which are released under a license that you are free to use in your games) I have also added a couple of game components to the code, the first is a simple frame rate component and the second is a Safe Area component. Both of these components can be turned on or off bye the game constants classes. (I do now that the last two components may not be released with a full game, but it was a good exercise to add them, as well as a good set of tools that I use when laying stuff out)
The last thing which I did today (Still plenty of the night to play) was to convert the framework into a template Starter Kit. Now when I want to crate a new game or application all I need to do is open Visual Studio and run the template.
I am looking at adding some sound to the project next, but am thinking do I use sound effect classes or Xact… I am leaning towards the Xact system. I am also thinking of looking at Nicks latest Storage Manager system and see if I can integrate it into the framework, doing this I will use the options menu and have the storage system save the configuration.
