One of the hidden gems in Visual Studio 2005 is the new improved Console. The old one was rather boring, with just simple printing and reading stuff. The new one is much more interesting. It lets you change the colour of text and background, move the cursor about and even poll the keyboard to see if a key has been pressed. Which means I can return to an old love of mine, dating back many years....

I can start to write text based console games again. One of my most successful programs was a text terminal Breakout type game for a South West Technical Products (SWTPC) microcomputer based on a 6809 processor. I wrote it in Lucidata Pascal in the early 80's and it spread like a virus all over the campus. It must have been responsible for many hours of lost work. Thinking back, I wish I'd sold it....

Anyhoo, I reckon that next year in the first year course, when we have VS 2005 all around the univeristy, we are going to write Snake as our first programming project. If you can't wait that long, just fire up VS2005 and take a look at the goodies that are available.