Patrolling the Longhorn precinct for the latest Windows Vista beta news, commentary, and technical info...
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Viva .NET! CLR on Xbox 360?
Mike Zintel from the .NET Compact Framework team this week made an excellent post to his blog containing some Microsoft history, some code, and some hints of things to come (my favorite combination!). Apparently there is some exciting work going on involving running .NET on, lo and behold, the Xbox 360:

I know that my team and the XNA team within Xbox, have been burning the midnight oil to allow us to demonstrate the feasibility of games written in managed code running on a .NET CLR on a final 360 dev kit. And I know that we’ve demonstrated the same game binary (almost the same; oh so close) running on the 360 kit, Windows and on Windows Mobile.

In HD.
Fast.
Stay tuned.

I'm trying not to get too worked up about running my apps on a quiet, slim $299 appliance because I know that even if this does eventually see the light of day, I'm sure the licensing and royalties process that exists for games would still apply for other applications. In other words, the average Officer Joe is not going to be able to hit Ctrl+Shift+B in VS and then xcopy to a non-devkit 360.

Still, it would be nice to be able to run .NET Reflector on Halo 3 ;)