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These include some titles from larger publishers that should’ve knownbetter – and niche publishers that should’ve known better to boot.Special thanks to Chris Remo, Kris Graft, and Leigh Alexander forsuggestions:
Javaground’s UniWar is a hex-based strategy game for iPhone that didn’t get nearly enough play. While Hudson was providing inferior ports of Military Madness to XBLA (and a decent port to Android), UniWar took the tried-and-true formula to the next state, with simple tweaks and clever unit pairings.
This was one of my favorite iPhone games of the year – it wasn’tamazing, but it provided a solid tactics experience in a year wherethat was really difficult to find on a handheld. Unfortunately itdidn’t really get picked up by the masses.
With more swearing than an American porno, HotD: Overkillrubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Its over-the-top exploitationfilm love, married with the classic light gun gameplay was too much forsome people. But it was not too much for Gamasutra’s Kris Graft, wholoved this game to pieces and put this on our list.
I do welcome the return of the light gun genre, and Headstrong did anexcellent job of recognizing what was good about the genre from agameplay perspective. Shame the “hardcore” Wii userbase doesn’t reallyseem to dig the old lightgun thing.
This was one of my personal surprises of the year. With Raiden,you pretty much figure you know what you’re getting, and to some extentI did. But there was so much more there under the surface. Raiden Fighters Acesgot me to fall in love with scores again, through its perfectimplementation of arcade fun. Big explosions, chunky pixely graphics,and ridiculously responsive controls, it’s the best I could hope from ashooter, in this day and age, or any previous.
I found myself going back to attempt single credit playthroughs,because the game essentially teaches you itself. Far from thebullet-hell shooters of the current era, RFAwinds up being more accessible and more inclusive than even modernindie shooting games. Well worth a spin, especially given the valueprice in the West.
Chinese developer Meridian hit it out of the park with Alive4Ever, but it was understandably somewhat glossed over. It’s one of many twinstick Smash TV-styleshooting games on the iPhone, so is easily dismissed. But theresponsive controls, and more importantly the different missions - fromrescuing survivors, to defeating enemies in specific ways, toharvesting gold - kept the missions fresh.
The game is plain fun, and when you layer on a level system withvarious upgradable weapons, accessories, and attributes, you’ve got agame that really caters to the “just one more” voice in all of us.
This is another one that I totally understand people skipping over. Thefighting genre is niche to begin with, and SNK releases so many KOF variants and ports that nobody but the hardest of the hardcore can keep up. But KOF 98 UM is a rebalanced version of the most popular KOF ever, with new characters to boot.
The game feels more kinetic and more explosive than ever, and thebalances really help make the game work much better in versus mode. Butin the shadow of the arguably regressive KOF 12, 98 UM really didn’t get the chance to shine. If you like fighting games and have ever wondered what KOF was all about, this is the game to start with. It showcases almost everything that is good about the series.
The Silent Hill series has taken some serious knocks,after the third. Most recently development shifted to the West, and forbetter or for worse, it seems here to stay. Double Helix dropped the ball on Homecoming, and Climax’s Origins didn’t fare much better – but the latter developer got a second chance with Shattered Memories,a reimagining of the original, and it works quite well. Though itdoesn’t have the scares of the PSX game, it does have thoughtfulpuzzling and a very well developed UI.
I’ve argued about this with the developers in person, but the blue icedenvironments just don’t have the scare factor of the originalrust-colored chainlinked worlds of Silent Hill for PlayStation – but the newest entry is the best Silent Hill in years, and it seems most have written off the series entirely at this point.
Shattered Memories is worth a shot for fans of the adventuregenre more than the survival horror genre. Fans and critics alike willdiscount the game based on the downturn in the legacy - but if you canget past the arguable lack of horror, you’ll have a nice gameexperience on your hands.
Here’s a protip if you want to get on the overlooked list – release agood, but very niche handheld game for $40. That will assure almostnobody will play it in spite of its quality, as is the case with Kenka Bancho: Badass Rumble,the third in Spike’s awesomely irreverent look at the world ofhighschool delinquents, released for $10 too much by Atlus in the U.S.(and not at all in Europe, so far).
This third person action game has you starring as an ambitious younggangster (bancho) who lacks street cred. As you progress, you use youreye beams to stare down other gangsters, (unfortunately staring atpeoples’ butts and crotches has been severely de-emphasized in this,the third entry in the series. It was rather hilarious.)
Crouch on the ground like a hooligan to regain your power, and engagein smack talking battles to raise in ranks and achieve dominancewithout fighting (of course, you do wind up fighting an awful lot). Theridiculous humor, fun action, and B-level nature of this game wouldhave you singing this game’s praises to your pals – if only it weren’tpriced out of most people’s “sure, I’ll try that” range.
There have been many theories as to why this game didn’t get thepopular reception it should have, in spite of overwhelming criticalapproval. Marvelous blames its own lack of brand appeal. Thedevelopment lead, producer Yoshiro Kimura worries that the game might appear too kiddy for more sophisticated audiences. But the fact is, this bizarre Pikmin-like game had way more to offer than most people realized.
It came from the mind of the creator of Chulip (Kimura), a game in which you must kiss people of all genders in order to make the world a happier place. In Little King’s Story,you play as an unintentional king who must unite the land, in anincreasingly bizarre adventure full of game and culture references,both obvious and obscure, which charmed the pants off of journalists,but they got it for free.
Those who had to pay kept their pants firmly affixed to their belts,and didn’t shell out for the title. Which is a shame, because if anythird party Wii game was trying to make something to fit the coreaudience while pleasing the casual, this was it.
It sure feels odd to put an EA game on the overlooked list, but here Igo. This is the final release from a whole Pandemic Studios, and in myopinion, their best game. I’ll admit to not being a huge fan of thestudio’s last work, but this one hits the right chords. It’s a GTA-likein which you throw Nazis to their doom (that’s fun), while liberatingParis (well, Paris is awesome), and driving sports cars and runningaround on rooftops (I’ll admit, I have a mild videogame rooftopfetish).
Like Infamous, Prototype, and Assassin’s Creed before it, The Saboteurfeatures parkour as a main method of getting around (it’s admittedlythe worst of the bunch at it – still fun though), and uses the player’sabilities to get into some interesting situations. One of my favoriteaspects is sneaking, in which you can sucker punch, garrote, orotherwise stealthily disable a Nazi and then steal their clothes toblend in and engage in subterfuge. Throwing a Nazi off a building,stealing his clothes, then blowing up his sniper roost has a certainkind of satisfaction associated with it.
The icing on the cake though, is the Will to Fight mechanic. The world of The Saboteuris black and white when controlled by the Nazi, and in color in areaswhere the French resistance is strong. This works surprisingly well –in the black and white areas, the main color you can see is the red ofNazi insignia – on armbands, on buildings, and on every Nazi target youcan blow up with dynamite (you do a lot of this).
This not only shows you an easy list of targets, it actually feelsoppressive. There are enemies everywhere, and in fact they’re the mostvisible thing in the environment. The environment changes back to colorin real time as you destroy more Nazi installations – it’s subtle, butfor me the mechanic really works.
If only the tone of the game had been more serious they could’ve reallyhad something there. But still, the game is good, I’m still playing at12 hours in, and it got neither the recognition nor the marketingbudget it deserved. It’s not perfect by any stretch, and it does havesome dastardly design choices at times, but it’s most definitelyoverlooked for its quality. And a fitting final effort from a studiothat exists now in name only.
1. Cryostasis (Action Forms Ltd./Aspyr/505 Games/Zoo Corp. – PC)
Ukrainian developer Action Forms Ltd. has released good games before - Chasm was well received, and the company’s other games have done rather alright. But Cryostasis,an FPS survival horror game, of a sort, is Action Forms' magnum opus. Ihave absolutely no doubt that if the game were released on homeconsoles, this would be one of the more talked-about games of the year,but the curious shape of game journalism means most of us tend toignore PC games in favor of the dedicated console experience. As itstands, this game hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves.
What’s so special about Cryostasis? A few things. First,it gets across the idea of cold (and for that matter warmth) incrediblywell. Cold is your enemy, and also very tied to your health. The gametakes place on a huge ship that’s been wrecked in the North Pole – andthe prior inhabitants have come back to life as horrific shadows oftheir former selves. You have to battle the cold, as well as the actualenemies, in order to stay alive.
In this game each encounter matters, in true oldschool survival horrorstyle, avoiding huge waves of enemies in favor of important dedicatedbattles. The main “gimmick” of this game is the ability to dive intothe memories of dead crew members you find, during which time you canattempt to avert the deaths of these characters. If you’re notconvinced, try on one of the more unusual brain dives for size. Mildspoilers included, but none that are really tied to the main story.
You come upon a meat locker. There, you have the ability to dive intothe memory of a slab of beef. You become a cow in a field – there’sreally not much you can do, other than die. But later, you have theability to play as the ship’s butcher. You can choose not to kill thecow – by not killing the cow, not only is that particular slab of beefno longer present in the meat locker, the butcher lives, because he wascrushed to death by that very beef slab.
The past few weeks have come with two major reveals for the weirdoswho follow online social networks. The first was big news. Twitter’sinternal documents leaked and the identity-crisis of earth’s most popular start-up is now public. The second was more under the radar but just as important. In a memo that went out to staff, the CEO of MySpace admitted that their users are caught between three competing notions of what MySpace is or should be.
Twitter and Myspace are different companies in different markets butthere is a lot of evidence to suggest that they share, and will alwaysshare, the exact same problem. MySpace and Twitter are hugely popular for uses neither company anticipated.The mission of each company is so vague that their products arestretched and molded into a variety of different uses. Instead oftargeting and building their business around one of these users they take their sudden popularity as a sign they have a killer product. They don’t.
Scale is Everything
When an industry is in transition or an idea like ‘social networking’ is still being fleshed out, getting explosively popular without knowing the nuances of why is a curse.Twitter is young but in my opinion, it’s already too late. It has growntoo big, too fast, for too many different purposes. It will take 2 orthree years but Twitter will be lapped by a variety of similar services with focus and actual business models; how Facebook developed in response to MySpace sheds light on what kind.
How MySpace Scaled
Since its inception MySpace has gone after users as if they werePokemon’. MySpace managers ran competitions on sign ups and theemployes used a slew of methods to capture. The result was a sprawlingnetwork of users but by 2005, it seemed to be working. If you looked at the stats, MySpace was an utter phenomena. It destroyed Friendster and after it was purchased by Murdoch it was getting all types of press and valuations. What the raw stats didn’t tell you is that user habits on the site looked something like this:
The problem with this way of scaling is simple. When a new cultural practice, like ’social networking’, is in the grass roots stages of development you can’t assume that people are going to your site because they like it.Your competition doesn’t really exist yet. What they might like are certain aspects of your productor they might be using parts of it in ways you never designed. The onlyway to address this is to study your users obsessively, focus on aparticular experience, then update your product accordingly.
Because MySpace grew in so many different markets at a single timeand gave users so much space to use the service how they liked, they’ve never been in a position to either watch or effectively control this experience. How do you update a product without knowing its target? You don’t. MySpace at its height and the current MySpace look remarkably similar, it lost control to its users. It has gone from being hailed as one of the best acquisitions ever made to a drain on News Corps portfolio. The results look like this:
How Facebook Scaled
When it comes down to it the mechanisms of MySpace and Facebook are not that different.Thepieces and concept are nearly the same. Both are constructed of userprofiles, avatars, walls, interest spaces, groups, photo capabilities,and a friend confirmation/listing process.
Facebook distinguished itself philosophically and pragmatically. Zuckerberg’s biggest insight into designing the site was that you are online who you are in real life. Facebook was one of the first social networks to emphasize genuine identityinsofar asthey required full names, university email addresses, and deleted accounts that used aliases. The second was pragmatic. Facebook launched in a single target market. In this case, of course, it was Harvard.
What this enabled was a less abstract more manageable mission.Instead of having to define what an ‘online social networking space’was supposed to be for everyone, Zuckerburg just had to answer forHarvard. As Facebook became popular on campus, he was able to see directly into how his peers interacted with the site and was able to update the product to help them use it more efficiently. Becausethey were all college students, the feedback he was getting was focusedand nuanced. Having less users also meant they could redesign theirentire product without pissing off disparate subsections. The resultwas an incremental evolution. The Facbeook that started at Harvard looks radically different than the one we use today. It worked.
How Twitter Scaled
Twitter grew much like MySpace. It ran competition for signing upusers, aliases were allowed, and it grew in multiple markets at theexact same time. Twitter started as a group SMS texting service then became popular for something wholly different. By restricting the length of a message the site inadvertently addressed one of the oldest problems in group communication. How do you hear many voices at a single time? Twitter’s answer is dead simple. 140.
This little restriction has produced a fascinating, highly-addictive product. If you look at the stats, Twitter seems to be working. It’s one of the most popular websites in the world and now has an excess of 44 million members.For those who invested or employees that had stock options, it must bean incredible feeling. I have grown to love Twitter but in my opinion we are rapidly approaching its peak.Its parallels toMySpace in 2006 are explicit. Twitterhas been bootstrapped for a vast number of uses and while its exciting to watch, its service is not containable . Like MySpace, Twitter is getting pulled in a variety of directions:
Why Twitter Will Dissolve and Turn into Detroit
The ability to hear and communicate messages with a group is what brought Twitter its initial wave of users but the real allure of Twitter, the reason it has caught the imagination of the press and millions of users, is something much more abstract. On Twitter, you can hear a public. Of course, there isn’t just one public, there is an infinite number.Whether it’s your country, your college, your city, or a shared nicheinterest like nyc media,everyone belongs to many publics and most everyone has a natural curiosity about what’s happening inside of them.
Twitter offers a way to manage how you see these publics. The problem is that its 140 character restriction is a blunt instrument. The site does not reflect the potential or nuance in which a public can speak to itself online.
Twitter as a network is an ungodly mess. From the onset, the site has allowed users to register aliases on custom URLs and because of it, usernames are inconsistent and confusing. It’s hard to find people who you know and its often even difficult to deduct wether that person is who they claim to be. Twitter is mobbed by impersonators,some of them hilarious, others manipulating. Twitter addresses thisissue recently by creating a ‘Verified Account’ stamp, its sloppy butmore importantly, perpetually incomplete.
There are a host of other problems related to reputation and maintaing users but the biggest issue concerns its identity, which is also where the leaked documentsgot interesting. Twitter employees are so clearly uncertain about whattheir product is even doing. Shots at it swayed from, “Twitter is fordiscovering and sharing what is happening right now,” to, “Twitter makes you smarter, faster, more efficient and more powerful.”
Twitter became popular before it had a mission. What this means is that its employees and investors will forever be trapped in boardrooms having these inane cyclical discussions about its identity. Twitter will either perpetually be simple insofar as its millions of users will have to hack the service to reflect their own values or it will roll the dice on a focus, put the site through chronic redesigns, and risk a mass user exodus.Either way its top talent will likely get frustrated and leave thecompany. Its top users will drift to something else then jump.
How Twitter will Resolve
The first thing to realize is that thereprobably isn’t going to be just one product to replace Twitter, therewill be several and they will battle it out or find niches. I see theirdesign following two trends with a potential for a hybrid.
The first trend is a service with the most minimal centralization possible. Both Dave Winer and Anil Dash have discussed plans for such a product. Winer calls his the RSSCloud and Dash describes the project more generally as the Push Button web. The RSSCloud grew from discussions with Jay Rosen over frustrations with Twitter and how its users have been bootstrapping. The line of thought is that your data belongs to you, not Twitter, and you should be able to use your data how you like with as little brand interference as possible. The proposal is to build RSSCloud, a loosely coupled service that will push your data to any website in real time.
The second is a product that is centralized but has an elegant way of organizingits content and attracting users. This is a product that would look andscale much like Facebook. It would start in a single target market anddevelop as a place for users to hear and communicate to thatpublic. Ideally it would begin in a cloistered network like auniversity where establishing members is as easy as checking their .eduemail address.
Addressing what’s wrong with Twitter isn’t going to come from thin air. It’s going to take a lot of time, development, and platform competition.
Many will soon be working on this, myself included. What will fill the blank is likely to define modern news production.
It’s fair to say that the founders of Metacritic never foresawit generating the attention it has attracted. Intended as a way ofseeing at a glance whether a game was worth buying, it’s now used asa measure of game quality by the largest publishers, developers andretailers.
John Riccitiello has used its scores todefine EA’s business strategy to analysts; Steam prominently displaysthem on its product pages; developer Frontier uses them for salesforecasting.
And this simple set of numbers is deemedresponsible for many industry ills, from over-examination of reviewscores to influencing developer royalties. “I’ve heard thatpublishers will try to put a step in royalty levels depending onMetacritic scores, or some sort of Metacritic-related compensationstructure to a deal,” says Andy Eades, development director atRelentless.
Metacritic is still edited by just one man,Marc Doyle. But his focus remains very much on the reason why it wasestablished in the first place. “I really see myself as a kind ofgatekeeper to tell people that these are the games you should be payingattention to,” he declares. His role is to gather scores andcomments for every game released in the US, choosing whichpublications are included and concocting the formula that combinesthem into a single number.
A night owl, he works into thesmall hours from his office in Los Angeles. And though it’s nowowned by CNET, Metacritic is still his baby, Doyle co-founding itafter studying at USC Law School. There he met Jason Dietz,who came up with the concept and name in 1999. They launched itin 2001 and sold it in 2005.
Metacritic isn’t the onlyinternet game review score aggregator. The other major site is GameRankings, also owned by CNET. Doyle and GR’s editor, Lee Alessi,“talk to each other,” but have different methodologies. GR’sscores are based on averages, while Metacritic weighs publications’scores differently, depending on Doyle’s opinion of their prestigeand quality. But he won’t reveal how.
Both work on the sameprinciple, however: consistently include enough reviews fromenough publications across enough games and the results will smoothout. “A big game – one of the GTAs – I know Edge is going toreview it, and I know an easy grader will too, and so the biggames will get the same treatment,” Doyle explains. “If I includeall your reviews and all theirs, it all works out.”
Certainly,viewed broadly, the games at the top of the scale are generally thebest games around, and the bottom ones certainly aren’t. Thechallenge for Doyle [pictured above] – and the main source ofcontroversy – is in his selection of publications. The originalbasis was: “Who is the most credible, who has the best reputation,the best analysis?”
But now, he says: “It’s essentiallyabout whether gamers are going to them because they’re reliable foradvice on what games they should buy. I really don’t have to do toomuch research because they just come to me. I check out their scoringmethodology, send out a questionnaire asking when they launched,how many reviews they cover a week, total reviews done, aboutstaff – all the things I’ve learned over the years that I have todo.”
Clearly, much credence is placed on metascores, buttheir use as a metric for business decisions also depends on whetherthere really is a causal relationship between scores and sales.“There’s anecdotal evidence both ways,” says Doyle. “I know thatcertain publishers have done very comprehensive studies and they’vebeen able to highlight certain types of games and certain types ofgenres for which predictability will be much higher – racing,sports and certain types of action games, certain types offranchises. Others you just don’t know, like why did the Ben 10game sell through the roof? I don’t know. It’s not sopredictable, it’s not scientific or perfect.”
Activisionhas made such studies. Executive VP of publishing Robin Kaminsky saidat the 2008 DICE conference that higher-quality games, based onscores from Game Rankings, on average sell more, and that for everyfive points above 80, on average, sales double. But she notedthat many games buck this trend, and that the largest publishershave found that the greatest sales growth tends to occur in gamesscoring in the region of 70 compared to those scoring 80 ormore.
She also presented 18 products achieving scores of90 or more in 2008 and 2007. Only two were projected to sellover seven million copies, while seven sold less than a million.Overall, 12 out of the 18 sold less than two million, afigure that marks a rough break-even point for a triple-A game. Inother words, there is a correlation but quality does not assuresuccess.
And yet Metacritic is still gaining in stature, apoint illustrated by the fact that Doyle is receiving increasingcorrespondence from publishers. “If I’m missing something,publishers contact me and ask whether there’s a bias or a systematicissue – ‘Why are you covering this publication and not another?’”
Indeed,many PRs are strongly affected by a greater use of metascores aswell. Certainly, we’ve spoken with a PR for a major publisher whoexpressed huge frustration with the stress their companies place ongetting the best they can. “PRs who haven’t been in the industry verylong will get angry when certain new publications that I know haven’tearned their reputation aren’t included, or some local daily paper,”says Doyle.
“I say, ‘Guys, they haven’t made it yet’ –I try to be as kind as I can because I know sometimes they haveclauses in their contracts that make them affected by metascores interms of bonuses or penalties.”
The practice could be subtlychanging the relationship between developers and publishers, too.“You really want a producer to focus on doing everything that’s rightfor the game, not to be focused unduly with the review score it’sgoing to achieve,” says Splash Damage’s Paul Wedgwood [above].
“Ifhis bonus is wound up at a score of 70 or 80, he might betempted to err on the side of caution rather than taking risks andpushing for an 85 or a 90. Look at projects like BioShock,for example – on paper that isn’t something any sane producer wouldtake on, but it’s obviously well justified by its review scores.”
Furtherto this, many developers of games for broader markets feel thatmetascores are unrepresentative of their work. “If you look at familygames and kids’ games, they consistently score as many as tenreview points lower for, dare I say, what’s similar quality,”says Frontier’s David Braben. “It’s actually really hard to make areally
good kids’ game.”
For Wedgwood, developers canbe more directly affected by a poor metascore. “The negative sideis if developers are penalised for achieving low scores despite nothaving control over the resources and schedule for the project.”
Doylethinks so too: “If they’re having to achieve a certain metascore withthe same budget, that’s disturbing.” But it depends on therelationship between developer and publisher as well, as Wedgwoodsays: “Obviously, if the developer is wholly or partially funding agame or has a strong relationship with the publisher and can determinewhen it’s going to be released and how much it’s going to cost tomake, it’s their responsibility. And I think in that situationit’s quite common for a publisher to have an expectation for quality.”
Indeed,Wedgwood is a proponent of the idea that publishers should offer abonus related to earning certain metascores: “I think that reallyshows confidence from the publisher, saying ‘irrespective ofwhether or not this is a commercial success we’re going to pay you abonus just for achieving a certain review score’ – that’s a realincentive.”
But Braben [above] argues that developers have hadincentives all along. “Think of sales as a great big glorifiedMetacritic,” says Braben. “There’s been a lot of earnest talk aboutusing Metacritic and Game Rankings to incentivise, but the one reallyobvious way of incentivising things is royalties. EA has giveninterviews in which it mentioned average Metacritic scores as being ametric of the quality of its games. The problem is, why is itquoting that and not sales success?”
Eades agrees,reminding us that game companies are businesses: “There’s no pointin getting nine out of ten, ten out of ten and then not sellingenough products to justify a sequel.”
Which brings us back to the fact that Metacritic was only ever meant to be a general
guideto what to play for a game-buying public. For as long as everyone inthe videogame industry remembers that at the heart of it are one man’sdecisions, it could have value as just one of many other ways ofmeasuring a game’s overall success.
And perhaps, among allthe fears that a new focus on quality by publishers has emerged, thisis a change for the better. Wedgwood certainly agrees: “Wouldn’teverybody rather be working for a publisher that’s more concerned aboutquality?
wwdc 08 really disappointed me, i was expecting apple to give out a mac book without keyboard, but a multi touch functional screen
Really ? I was hoping steve would sumo wrestle with ballmer. Why is it everyone gets these inflated expectations of apple events. Then whines when the magic pony touchscreen doesn't appear ? Seriously when apple do a tablet it won't be a mac book without a keyboard , you want that get a mod book ( they look quite nice ). What will likely make an appearance is a larger say 7 -10" ipod ala the touch. Why ? Well tablets suck they form factor is totally askew. Anything over that 10" size is too unwieldy. I doubt we'll see this tablet anytime soon. The iPhone OS is still evolving & spin off products won't make an appearance until development of the OS has stabilized. But hey we can all wish for that flying pony next time steve takes the stage ( either of them )
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