My first Xbox Live Indie Games title is now available!

Check it out: Baby Soothing Machine, the app designed by a dad, for other parents. 

I was sitting in my living room at 4AM one morning, feeding the baby.  He was being difficult about going to sleep.  I was using an app on my wife’s phone that created white noise.  As I was sitting there, I looked up at my 52” TV, and my 5.1 surround sound system, and wondered why I couldn’t use that equipment to help soothe him back to sleep.

So, I decided to make it happen.  Now, for just $1, you can do the same.  Use your Xbox 360 and your sound system to help soothe your baby to sleep.  Baby Soothing Machine has several different sounds to choose from, ranging from white noise to brown, all the way to a seascape. 

In addition, there’s a virtual mobile on the screen.  Large shapes rotate on the screen, colored with bright primary colors with lots of contrast.  The perfect colors to attract and hold baby’s attention while the sounds work their magic.

Announcing Gobi

I’m going to be starting on a new application very soon.  It’s designed for/targeted at professional window tinters.  The goal is to make it easier for those folks to figure out how much window tint they will need in order to complete a given residential or commercial job.

Since I’m going to be learning some new things, I thought I’d take the opportunity to share my process for building this app.  This will be my first commercial, only for-sale application, and I’m pretty excited about it.

A good friend of mine is a professional tinter, and he mentioned that it was hard to get these estimates done, since there’s a fair bit of calculation involved in minimizing the number of rolls of tint you have to order.  Tint rolls are sold by different companies, with different properties, and in different widths.  One of the tint manufacturers produces a piece of software to help with this process, but the software only supports their brand of tint (duh, right?).

Since I’m a software dev and not a tint manufacturer, my plan is to support products from multiple manufacturers.

The basic design of the app will be a desktop application which does the calculation and layout.  I will provide a cutlist diagram, so the tinter can easily see which windows’ tint should be cut from each roll, and how to optimally lay those cuts out, to maximize tint usage and minimize the material needed.

The software will save these quotes/proposals locally, and let you come back to edit/revisit them later.  This will help tinters to create an estimate for a customer, then edit that estimate if the customer wants to make changes.  A new cutlist will be generated every time the size and/or number of windows in the job gets changed. 

The application will also have a webservice that i can contact in order to receive updates to the tint products database.  This way, I can easily keep all the copies up to date as I add support for more manufacturers and tint products.  The database will be stored locally as an XML dataset, since I expect it to be pretty small.  If the DB size grows larger than I expect it to, I’ll move to using SQL Express (or perhaps the embedded sql solution).  I’d prefer to avoid that, so I can avoid having that dependency in my code.  The less people have to download to get up and running, the better.

The UI will be done using WPF.  I’ve not done any WPF coding before, so this is a good chance for me to learn what’s up with WPF, and use it in a real application.  Turns out that working at MS, on a software service, tends to keep you behind on new desktop UI technologies.  I need to get caught back up on the cutting edge, so this project will help me do that.

I picked Gobi as a codename because thinking of window tint always makes me think of heat, and Sahara is pretty well taken by the movie :).

Follow the leader

First, some disclaimers.

1. I work for Microsoft, on Microsoft Office Live
2. I do not work on C#, VB.Net, or even in Developer Division (DevDiv)

Ok, on to the point. Jeff Atwood recently posted about some frustration he's dealing with regarding the differences between C# and VB.Net. Here's the article: C# and the Compilation Tax

I noticed something when I worked at GeoAge (How's that for link love to the company that had to lay me off?). We were a VB.Net shop, and I'm pretty sure they still are. I was a C# dev at heart. One thing that I hated about using both languages was that Intellisense was a lot better in VB than in C#. Autocomplete in particular saved me thousands of keystrokes a day at work.

Then I started playing with VS 2005. Turns out that in 2005, C#'s intellisense seemed to take a huge cue from VB, and we had equivalent completion, and intellisense.

I've developed a theory. The VB team focuses a lot of energy on making developing code easier, while the C# team devotes time to making the language more powerful. I think the C# team then capatilizes (one version back) on the work from the VB team. Probably under a lot of pressure from their customers, since they see how much more productive VB devs can be.

So, I expect that in the next version or two of VS, we'll see background compilation in C#, and see the My namespace make it into C#. Those are my predictions.

Just hold on Jeff, and hopefully the C# team will make you happy. Of course, by the time they do, the VB team will have some new thing that makes their devs more productive, so you'll be wanting more from the C# team. It's a vicious cycle, but I think it makes C# a better language, and the .NET platform stronger. If you can deal with being a cycle back in productivity.