In comments, Daniel Crenna asked "What do you think of the Garden Point Ruby.NET compiler? If Microsoft supported this project financially, why do you think they didn't put together an in-house project similar to Jim's IronPython for the Ruby equivalent?"

I've swapped a couple emails with the GP guys …

Mitch Walker provides an excellent screencast showing the use of components within XNA GSE. However, looking at it I kept thinking "Shouldn't this be a domain-specific language"? I have to be careful here because, obviously, drag-and-drop designers have proven to be successful. But using the design surface as nothing but …

The release of IronPython is, in and of itself, A Good Thing. But maybe the best thing is that it's a shared-source release with a very reasonable license. Not because I'm a utopian about the quality of open source, but because I really quite like the code structure. Apropos my …

The September 1st issue of SD Times contains two opinions on Ruby, "It Isn't All A Gem," by Andrew Binstock and my "Crossing the Chasm." Allen Holub's column "Just Say No to XML" is also provocative. As usual, surface disagreements belie underlying agreements: there is nothing that either Andrew or …

Wow, what a great day: First, IronPython 1.0 is released and now comes word that Turbo Delphi, C#, and C++ are free for download.

In a forthcoming column in SD Times, I predicted that one of the first things written using XNA GSE would be a Bittorrent client for the XBox360. Wrong. The current version of XNA does not allow network access.

Hmm...

This one just shot through the blogosphere: the idea that VS Express might have been bundled with Vista. Although I do not believe that VB.net is actually a "beginner's" language, that there could have been such a powerful environment broadly available is a sorely missed opportunity.

This one just shot through the blogosphere: the idea that VS Express might have been bundled with Vista. Although I do not believe that VB.net is actually a "beginner's" language, that there could have been such a powerful environment broadly available is a sorely missed opportunity.

I've abused Jeff Atwood's comments section enough, but I want to continue ranting about multicore machines.

One of the themes in his comment section is that games don't speed up on multicore machines. This is largely true. Jeff points out, correctly, that most games are video-processor bound and not CPU-bound …

Look how natural that looks. Doesn't that look good? Wouldn't you buy that? I'd buy that. My friends would buy that. You'd buy that. Of course you would.