Microsoft wants Windows developers to write Windows 8-specific, Metro-style, touch-friendly applications, and to make sure that they crank these apps out, the company has decided that Visual Studio 11 Express, the free-to-use version of its integrated development environment, can produce nothing else.<p>

If you want to develop desktop applications—anything that runs at the command line or on the conventional Windows desktop that remains a fully supported, integral, essential part of Windows 8—you'll have two options: stick with the current Visual C++ 2010 Express and Visual C# 2010 Express products, or pay about $400-500 for Visual Studio 11 Professional. A second version, Visual Studio 11 Express for Web, will be able to produce HTML and JavaScript websites, and nothing more.

Flipping heck. Former Microsofties are appalled.

This was highlighted by the <a href="http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/03/27/hugely-popular-ios-game-temple-run-is-now-available-for-android/">recent release of Temple Run</a> on the Android platform. A previously (very) successful game on iOS, it was brought over to Android in order to take advantage of the huge number of devices that run the OS. And it has already hit <a href="http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/03/30/temple-run-gets-a-lot-of-google-play-1-million-android-app-downloads-in-3-days/">1 million downloads</a> in just 3 days, good, even for a free app. But very quickly, the developers of the app discovered the pitfalls of fragmentation

Read the comments too, though: plenty of Android developers saying they don't have any problem. Seems like it's more of a problem for games developers.

"I still can’t figure out exactly which operations are expensive in Python. My C/C++ can’t help me much because it seems that things aren’t implemented like I’d've expected—like lists that aren’t lists, but array lists, leading to  for operations you would otherwise expect to be .<br />
"But a friend of mine—Olivier—showed me a simple, basic, yet rather effective tool to profile Python programs (I’m not sure if I should say script or not).<br />
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"The tool, RunSnakeRun, inserts hooks in the Python interpreter to build a report of where time is spent, a bit à la Valgrind/Kcachegrind but much simpler, and to display the results using both tables and a rectangular tree-structured inclusion graph (a “SquareMap”)."<br />
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Neat.

"...we’ve been surprised by the optimism among companies we’re talking to, and they’re not just having wishful thoughts. The specific reasons: Google+ is a respectable product, it’s grown quickly, there are clear social communication channels like Streams where developers could promote discovery and engagement, and the transaction fee is likely to be quite low."