It's been a long wait but if you've got an Intel Mac and want to use Mono then there is now an official build for Intel OSX available. This makes me more happy than I can possibly explain because the official way to code the Mac, Objective C, sucks so badly it hurts so being able to use C# is a joy.

Have you ever considered creating an army of robots in order to take over the world but been put off by the hassle of coding them? Does the Lego Mindstorms development environment hold your killer robot back? Do you wish you could use C# to code your robots? If this is the case then Microsoft have the answer with their new Robotics Studio. This looks like it's great news, and when you add the fact that Lego Mindstorms NXT will be out soon (just don't look at the price) my army of killer robots are only a few months away from...

Why does the Zip file extraction wizard not disable the next button while it's processing? You can press it multiple times and you'll set off several extraction operations. Does anybody know why this is?

From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html I managed to get four pet features added to Basic. I got them to add Variants, a union data type that could hold any other type, because otherwise you couldn't store the contents of a spreadsheet cell in a variable without a switch statement. Joel just owned up for getting the most evil invention ever added to Visual Basic. Then, to top it off he owns up to the second most evil invention ever: IDispatch I got them to add late binding, which became known as IDispatch, a.k.a. COM Automation, because the original design for Silver required a deep understanding...

The company in which an old friend of mine works is looking for a web developer to join their team in Reading (UK). The company is called Appswing and is doing some really interesting (and cool) work with HTML access to applications. I'm reliably told that it's a great place to work, so take a look if you're interested. Even if you're not take a look at what they do because it's really quite interesting from a technical point of view.

After my post yesterday on the change of the name from WinFX to .NET 3.0 I've had a chance to think about it properly and I've figured out what I actually think about it. I've always had a concern with WinFX which has kept me from looking too hard at it (beyond being dismayed at the video support in WPF, but that's a post for another day) but I never really thought about it enough to figure out what it was. I now realise that the name change is exactly what I was uncomfortable with: it was a separate entity...

The problem with Microsoft is that they keep trying to simplify their names so much you need to draw diagrams to figure out what is what. This is actually quite interesting as it sends the message to Mono that they have to support all these new APIs. .NET Framework 3.0:When speaking to developers about WinFX one question that repeatedly comes up is, ‘WinFX sounds great, but what happens to .NET?’ .NET Framework has becomes the most successful developer platform in the world. 'Developers know and love .NET. The .NET Framework has always been at the core of WinFX, but the WinFX brand...

This is the best thing ever. For today. Announcing MSDN Wiki!: "We publicly released MSDN Wiki this morning, at http://msdnwiki.microsoft.com.' Check it out and let us know what you think.' You can post feedback here in our blog, or file bugs and suggestions in the MSDN Wiki Connect Workspace. ' What is MSDN Wiki? ' The MSDN Wiki site experiments with ways we can integrate community contributions into the Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0 documentation.' This is phase one.' On the current site you can add content and edit other people’s contributions in a wiki-like fashion...

Why is Texture.FromBitmap so slow in .Net 2.0: To be able to convert from every possible format of bitmap, Managed DirectX uses Bitmap.GetPixel to read each pixel. This means height*width calls into GDI. Unfortunately due to a known issue (passport required) with the way that the managed debugging assistants (MDAs) work in Visual Studio there is a huge amount of overhead with each under-the-covers PInvoke. This overhead combined with the height*width calls means that textures can take minutes to convert into textures and you would probably think your application has crashed. ... (Via The Z Buffer.) I'd coded around this a while...