I just got an e-mail notifying me that renewal time for my XNA subscription is in another month. I signed up for XNA development a year ago. It cost 99 USD/year. After paying the 99 USD one is able to debug and run .Net based XNA games on the Xbox 360. I signed up not because I was interested in making games but because the Xbox 360 is a nice piece of hardware. It's got 6 cores, 2 of which are dedicated to the operating system leaving 4 cores for the developer to use as he or she sees fit. I had planed to try out some graphic and AI algorithms on the 360 and experiment with some multiprocessor programming techniques (not to be confused with multithreading).
So what have I done in the past year? Nothing. A shortcoming of the development tools for the XNA framework is that they don't work on multihomed computers (computers with more than one active network card). Conventional thinking may lead one to try to disable the other network cards that are not being used. Unfortunatly that wasn't an option for me. The VM software that I have installed creates several virtual network adapters, none of which can be disabled. So for the past year my 99 USD has given me very little.
This year will be different. I purchased a new computer that I only plan to use for recreational computing (which will include programming the xbox 360). I won't be installing any VM software on the new machine. Hopefully I'll be able to get started with something this weekend.
Tags: xna