Dennis Hayes

This book is a great introductory and tutorial book for XNA programming. It's clearly written, assumes no significant prior knowledge, and will have even beginners creating basic games by the end of the book. Chapter 1 gives a crash course in .NET and programming in C#. It's a nic... (more)

This is a great book on LINQ from some people who not only know LINQ, but also understand LINQ. Many current LINQ books are based on preview versions of LINQ, but authors Fabrice Marquerie, Steve Eichert, and Jim Wooley thought it worth waiting for the final released version befo... (more)

Time sneaks up on us. Last month’s issue started year six of “Monkey Business” in .NET Developer’s Journal. Many thanks to all the readers who made this milestone possible. You can revisit all of the past “Monkey Business” columns. Last Novembe... (more)

As promised by the author, this book starts with code (“Hello LINQ”), ends with code (a query joining database data with XML data), and is code-heavy in the middle. All the code runs and the output is listed in the book. The code snippets you can steal will quickly re... (more)

Big Boo-Boo on the Mono Web Site The Mono Web site has, in some cases, been downloading a very old version of Mono. It serves as a fine example of what can go wrong with software, even with the best of intentions, and without anyone really making a mistake. What happened was back... (more)

Mono has released version 1.2.6 and it includes a lot of good stuff. One big addition in 1.2.6 for Mac fans includes a native Winforms driver for OS X that lets Winforms-based applications to run without X Server. This is good news because it means better performance, and will all... (more)

In part because of MoMA, the Mono analyzer, there were 1,907 new methods implemented in this release, System.Data is 99% compatible with .NET 2.0, and about 150 bugs were fixed in System.Windows.Forms alone. This was the first version released after Novell hired a full-time QA per... (more)

Just as I'm finishing this column, Miguel comes on chat (#mono on irc.gnome.) and mentions that the media embargo on project "Barking Duck" will be lifted at midnight. "Project Barking Duck" is an inside joke at Mono and not actually a project. But the media embargo was real. A... (more)

SharpDevelop 2.2 SharpDevelop has released version 2.2. Version 2.2 is mostly a bug fix release, but also adds support for newer versions of Boo (0.7.8), NUnit(2.4.1) and Wix (2.0.5325), Cecil (0.5), additional templates have been added, and SharpDevelop Reports 2.2 are included ... (more)

Microsoft has a new set of technologies called Silverlight that are meant to bring rich multimedia to browsers and portable devices. They have released two versions: a full release of version 1.0 and a beta version of 1.1. Version 1.0 is not very interesting, but the 1.1 beta is ... (more)

What Is BPEL? BPEL or Business Process Execution Language is an XML and Web standards-based SOA (service-oriented architecture) standard that allows business people to combine services into automated processes. As described in this review, Active Endpoints' ActiveBPEL product fam... (more)

Mono version 1.2.4 has just been released. Typically source code for a release is branched off for final clean up and bug fixing, with the release coming a few days to a week later; for this version, there were almost 25 days between branch and release. This may have been due in ... (more)

Portable.NET has released PNET 0.8, its first packaged release in more than a year. There were many improvements over the course of the year, but the biggest were associated with the upgrade to the new Libjit JIT engine. The source code is at http://download.savannah.gnu.org/rele... (more)

When the first draft of the C# 2.0 spec was released, the Mono team started working on it immediately. The first draft of the C# 3.0 spec has now been out for almost a year, but the Mono team has just started to work on it. There are two reasons for this: one is that the whole te... (more)

Mono has released version 1.2.3, and there are a lot of improvements and additions. In my opinion, the biggest addition is the new Visual Basic compiler. It's not ready for prime time and is still officially unsupported, but this is the first version of VB to be included as a sta... (more)

Mono 1.2.2 was released last month, and with the help of the Mono Migration Tool, Moma, which was discussed last month, 496 new methods were added, 212 "bogus" to-dos were removed, and 65 NotImplementedExceptions were removed. If you want an easy way to help the Mono project, down... (more)

When a project like Mono approaches a major release like version 1.2, the code is forked: copied into a separate branch in version control. In one copy, the "main" branch, work continues normally, while the code in the other "release" branch goes through a series of freezes leadi... (more)

The long-awaited third major release of Mono, version 1.2 is now out. The main delay was getting System.Windows.Forms (SWF) to work cross platform. This has been accomplished for the most part. There are a few of the rarely used methods still being worked on, but the vast majorit... (more)

The highlight of this release is the new MonoBASIC compiler and runtime. The availability of BASIC on Mono has waxed and waned over the years. During the early days of Mono, BASIC received little or no attention. The biggest reason was that all the effort was going into the C # c... (more)

Mono 1.1.16, the third beta of version 1.2, has been released. The time span between the release of versions 1.1.15 and 1.1.16 is one of the longest in several years and the number of changes included reflects that, again System.Windows.Forms (SWF) and System.Drawing got the most... (more)