XNA and Visual Studio 2012 on Windows 8

Microsoft does not always make it easy to use their latest toys.

The Good
I recently rebuilt my computer and, wanting to stay on the forefront of technology, I of course installed Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012. Both products come with a series of pros and cons, but the quick boot up times of Windows 8 and the parallel builds of Visual Studio 2012 make them both winners in my book.

The Bad
That being said, the first project that I wanted to work on after rebuilding my machine was a small XNA game that I have been writing for a while now. Unfortunately that XNA has been unofficially retired, and Microsoft is not making it easy for people to continue using their product.

And The Ugly
To use XNA on Windows 8 you must first download and install Games for Windows LIVE Redistributable. Then you must install XNA Studio into Visual Studio 2010 and manually copy the installed assemblies to Visual Studio 2012.

Here are the details:

• How to install the XNA Game Studio 4.0 in Windows 8?
• How to install XNA game studio on Visual Studio 2012?

I hope that helps,
Tom

jQuery Refresh Page Extension

There are three scenarios when a web page refreshes:

1. Honors your cache (does not make resource requests).
2. Verifies your cache (causes resources to generate 304s).
3. Ignores your cache (causes resources to generate 200s).

For a simple page refresh you want your webpage to generate as few server requests as possible. There any many ways to refresh a page in JavaScript, however they can all have different and sometimes undesirable results. Let's look some code snippets of the aforementioned scenarios in reverse order.

3. Ignore Cache

window.location.reload(true);

This scenario is not usually necessary unless you know that the resources of your page have been updated. Also, using a good minification framework is probably a better way of ensuring that your clients always consume the latest resources with every request.

2. Verify Cache

window.location.reload();

This is obvious similar to the first call, only we are calling an override of the reload method that tells the browser to respect cache. However, this will still cause a series of 304 requests!

1. Honor Cache

window.location.href = window.location.href;

This is obviously a very simple way to refresh the page, and it will honor cache without forcing 304 requests. However, this will not work if your includes a hash tag.

jQuery Plugin

This little jQuery plugin will refresh the page and try to cause as few resource requests as possible.

(function($) {

    $.refreshPage = refreshPage;

    function refreshPage(reload) {

        if (reload === true) {

            window.location.reload(true);

            return;

        }

        var i = window.location.href.indexOf('#');

        if (i === -1) {

            // There is no hash tag, refresh the page.

            window.location.href = window.location.href;

        } else if (i === window.location.href.length - 1) {

            // The hash tag is at the end, just strip it.

            window.location.href = window.location.href.substring(i);

        } else {

            // There is a legit hash tag, reload the page.

            window.location.reload(false);

        }

    }

})(jQuery);

Enjoy,
Tom