Yea, since you only charge $20 it's already a different business model than Starcraft or SoaSE. The trial should be enough for getting friends hooked, and the marginal increase in such sales of a limited 2-for-1 would probably not outweigh the marginal loss.
Yeah, that was my thinking -- it might change in the future, but for now, since this is my first time with selling software in any manner other than b2b (which is frequently complex and requires multi-page contracts), I thought I'd just keep it simple and try to be as fair to everyone involved with just the one price.
True, and they even have the honesty to require you to use a directive called "unsafe" 
Haha, yeah.
Lots of folks ran into some serious memory management performance problems when writing C# for the XBox because they were used to just using "new" wherever it felt natural. The console platform wasn't amused. Even in database programming it's often advantageous to pool expensive resources like db-connections, so it's a pattern worth knowing.
Yeah, definitely. And fortunately, it's the sort of thing you can start out with it being simple (just use new), and then refactor later. Assuming that you have a Factory design pattern or something similar in place (which I do in AI War for that sort of thing). So that's nice, it's not like you have to be super caution at first, you can then just profile and optimize as the project grows.
I remember working in QBASIC for a while, modding the gorilla game a bit but nothing much serious. Line numbers are more than brittle, they're insane 
I like how in Java "goto" is both a reserved word and a syntax error. At the assembly level it makes more sense since it really is just a list of instructions. I helped my Dad once with some PIC assembler when he was incorporating a GPS location-stamp onto some police-car-vcr controlling software/firmware. I prefer higher level languages, but it was interesting.
Yeah, definitely insane.
And while I do have a fond spot for assembly, it's too cumbersome to do much very interesting with most games. I'm working on some robot code off and on these days, mostly in C#, but we might add a little microcontroller for some of the hardware and that would be one of those newer ARM assembler variants, I forget which one. I kind of look forward to being able to experiment in that, but it might be a few years out (this robot thing has been a five year project already, with very little for me on the software side since so much hardware work is what really takes the time).
At work we're migrating from ColdFusion to .NET for our web application layer, and the framework I'm writing pretty much completely bypasses the normal ASP.NET way of doing things. We might move to the ASP MVC framework later (our custom coldfusion framework is more or less MVC), but I'm still a bit skeptical of the overhead. At points I've been pretty close to writing my own web-app-layer in C# and not using ASP.NET at all, but both my remaining sanity and the response I'd expect from our systems team hold me in check
Oh yeah, that's what I did at my work. I wrote everything using IHttpHandler and not much else. I don't use their session state (wrote my own database-based one that works better for my purposes), and I also don't use their viewstate (man is that a good way to bloat a page). I don't have WYSIWYG support in my classes, but none of our programmers have ever missed that. This is a half a million line of code system, so it's more important to be able to maintain encapsulation, have proper inheritance and enable reflection, etc.
Sure, I have a few hobby game projects going in addition to the work-work. Sorry for derailing the thread
Cool stuff, and no worries about derailing the thread (but if this side convo goes on, we should probably move to a different thread). I'm always interested in hearing about methods and such that other programmers are using, and sharing my own.
Chris
