The other day I was playing with Expression Blend and I noticed that many of the keyboard shortcuts in Blend are the same shortcuts that Illustrator uses. Here's a screencast of some of the things I found.

A flash version of the screencast is available here. Microsoft Expression Blend Uses Common Keyboard Shortcuts

Mitch Walker recently posted a short screencast showing off the Game Components features of the XNA Framework.

This is awesome. I completely wrote off the XNA Framework when I read the FAQ and learned how crippled the functionality is in this initial beta. But this short screencast got me very excited about the possibilities.

The idea of component based game development could be huge. If this takes off it could really revitalize the game development world. Personally I'm tired of paying $50+ for another rehash of the latest First Person Shooter. I long for games that focus on new and interesting game play rather than glitzy graphics and crappy stories. Here's hoping that XNA can do for game development what VB did for Windows software development. Good job XNA Team!

This also helps reinforce the idea that a focused, short, concise screencast is incredibly powerful. Thanks to Jon Udell for having the vision, passion, and patience to lead the way. He truly is one of my heroes.

Installing SQLite 3 on Windows is pretty easy, once you figure out what you need to do. But when I started using Ruby on Rails I struggled to figure out what I needed to do. Here's a short screencast that demonstrates how you can install SQLite 3 on Windows so you can use it in your Ruby on Rails applications.

A flash version will eventually be available here.