No technical posts this weekend. I was having fun at a horse show, and did not touch a computer all weekend.

The weekend hunter jumper show in OKC was a success for Ashton Fitzpatrick and Rocket.  Ashton took three fourths, a fifth and two sixth place finishes on Rocket, which she has been riding for about four weeks. We cannot thank Ashton enough for taking time out of her busy life as a jockey at Remington Park to train with Rocket.

Here's some visual of the weekend:

And some photos:

First day awards for Ashton and Rocket.

I switch often between c++ and web development in VS 2008.  There is a command line switch that allows you to switch environments. 

Here's the command line switch:

devenv.exe /ResetSettings settingsFile.vssettings

My short cut setting ends up looking like the following for C++

"D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe"
  /ResetSettings "C:\Some Dir\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Settings\c++-2009-06-04.vssettings"

My web dev startup looks like:

"D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe"
  /ResetSettings "C:\Some Dir\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Settings\Web-2009-06-19.vssettings"

Unfortunately, starting up VS 2008 this way takes time.  Lots of time.  I've been playing with VS 2010 beta, and it seems to have the same issue.  Why change settings?  Try opening a web project with C++ settings and you will see what I mean.  Menu options are missing.  I played around with customizing the environment, but I am not enough of a VS 2008 whiz to get it the way I want it.  Perhaps I'll dive into it some rainy Saturday now that football season is over.

Looks like the real solution would be to have VS 2008 setup on two different VMs.  My D drive is always mapped to virtual machines anyway, so everyone has access to the VSS database.  All it takes is time, a few Gigs of RAM and a TByte of disk, right?

In order to work on the current releases of WinROTT, you need to be familiar with GameDev.Net, and the circa 1999-2000 articles.  I've found the series Game Programming Genesis by Joseph Farrell to be informative.  Part IV : Introduction to DirectX is helpful for understanding older versions of DirectX and why developers may have followed a particular path that no longer makes sense.  You also need a solid understanding of COM when working with older versions of DirectX, the components tend to be most accessible via COM/ActiveX interfaces.

Good luck with your game programming.  And remember to visit GameDev for the latest development techniques.