Blogus Maximus

For those wanting to keep track of Chris Williams's activities, you can catch his blog entries at BlogusMaximus.net. He recently featured an interview with yours truly that can be found here: http://blogusmaximus.net/archive/2008/07/21/123934.aspx. As a reminder, Chris was one of the MVPs to evaluate the Game Development students last fall. The blog is a great place to go for the latest info on Microsoft Development stuff and the semi-cool things he occasionaly does.

MVPs Incoming

For anyone perusing this lonely page, I just wanted to note that we'll be hosting two Microsoft MVPs in December. Andy "ZMan" Dunn and Chris "No Catchy Nick" Williams will be here on campus Tuesday, December 4th and Wednesday, December 5th for a series of workshops and to judge the games that my COSC 480 class will be presenting the evening of the 5th. They will be doing at least one "beginners" workshop utilizing Microsoft's XNA technology, a way to create great games fast. XNA is being used as the primary technology for the COSC 480 Game Design and Development course offered this fall. Be sure to check out one or more of the activities that they'll be participating in!

Bios:

Andy spent 15 years writing business applications in managed code, starting when managed code was called Visual Basic 3.0. He spent 8 of those years building web applications for Microsoft's procurement and financial departments and in his spare time maintained www.thezbuffer.com the leading community web site for Managed DirectX. As the web site took up more of his time he left Microsoft to form ZBuffer Games, a consultancy concentrating on games and game technology in managed code. ZBuffer Games produced the Space War starter kit that ships with every download of XNA Game Studio Express as well as the Marblets starter kit supplies on www.xna.com. Andy has been a DirectX Microsoft MVP since 2006.
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Chris Williams is a Microsoft MVP, Microsoft Certified Trainer, Microsoft Certified Solution Developer and .NET Technology Evangelist. He is also the leader of the Twin Cities XNA User Group and a prolific technology blogger, focusing primarily on Microsoft Technologies.

Chris is a Sr. Consultant & Technology Evangelist for the Minneapolis branch of Magenic. Magenic is a Microsoft Gold Partner and was recently named a Solution Provider Partner of the Year. As a Technology Evangelist, Chris is sometimes called upon to deliver webcasts and podcasts on various Microsoft technologies.

In addition to his full time job, Chris also dedicates a significant amount of his "extra" time speaking at user groups & code camps on a variety of topics, including XNA Game Development, GDI+ & ASP.NET. Chris is also the author and maintainer of an open source CRPG, titled Heroic Adventure! which is written entirely in Visual Basic .NET.