The recently released Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 does not support mobile development for OS versions prior to the new Windows Phone 7. If you want to write software for Windows Mobile 6.5 or lower, you need to stick to Visual Studio 2005. So much for backward compatibility.

Apple has recently announced the long anticipated release 4.0 of their iPhone OS. The list of new end-user features is disappointingly short - the main item seems to be the addition of some GUI multitasking. Many important, easy to add and practical features, already found in the "jailbreak" versions are not mentioned.

Monitoring text log files is quite important activity in our day to day programming lives. Unfortunately, Windows operating system does not include convenient tools to perform the task by default. Nothing comparing to tail -f or GNU less is deployed with an installation of the OS from Redmond. Luckily, some free alternatives are available on the Internet.

I have recently installed Fedora Core 12 on my server box. It was an upgrade from Fedora Core 9 and I had to do an intermediate upgrade from 9 to 10, since direct transition from 9 to 12 is not supported. Aside from this small annoyance the process went through very smoothly. It looks like Fedora Core 12 supports an "in place" upgrade mode, similar to recent version of Ubuntu.

With arrival of WPF the usage of INotifyPropertyChanged interface has expanded dramatically. The most annoying and dangerous part of implementing the interface is, obviously the fact, that you have to pass your option names as strings. This leaves your code prone to bugs - if in 3 months time you rename one of the properties, there is very good chance that you will forget to update the string name as well. In order to overcome the problem we can use some reflection and a little bit of boiler plate code. The good people of the Internet have done all the work for us already, so just copy, paste and enjoy!

It is nice to be able to blog about software. For instance, a few years ago I wrote an article about web development using C++. I still get a comment or two about it almost every week, despite the fact that not a single line of code has been written for the project, unfortunately.

I have never suspected that Microsoft had this built-in, but it appears to be the case. Code generator called T4, which targets both C# or VB.NET, is built into your copy of Visual Studio and is available as you read this article.

For years I was server-oriented developer, quite often writing code for Unix environment and helping others to do so. However I never mind doing occasional user-oriented application or two. Lately I've been doing a lot of .NET GUI development using WPF (Windows Presentation Framework). A small task seems to come up quite often.

Great new piece of software, recently discovered by me - Foxit PDF Reader. Just a few advantages over the standard Acrobat Reader: it's faster, simpler and, most important, it allows you to save data in PDF forms!

I like Drupal a lot. It's a great system, easy to set up and use, and the most important thing, there are plenty of modules, which provide additional functionality. However, every time the Drupal development team release a new major version, the module authors have to change their modules in order to adopt to the new platform.