Fans of the C# language will find much to like in Visual C# 2005. Visual Studio 2005 brings a wealth of exciting new features to Visual C# 2005, such as generics, iterators, partial classes, and anonymous methods. While generics is the most talked-about and anticipated feature, especially among C++ developers who are familiar with templates, the other new features are important additions to your Microsoft .NET development arsenal as well. Read more here.

Apple Computer Inc. is seeking Common Criteria evaluation of Mac OS X, which could open government doors wider to open-source software. Apple wants a Common Criteria Evaluated Assurance Level 3, which "costs big bucks," said John Hurley, Apple’s security policy architect. "It's a pain in the neck to spend that money." Elsewhere, C|Net has two more Apple-related articles here and here.

As part of the Lindows-to-Linspire name change promotion, a new ISO image of Linspire 4.5 has been made available for free download, DistroWatch reports.

For the first time, Apple sold more iPods in a quarter than it did Macs--and Apple CEO Steve Jobs is happy about it, MacMinute reports. "We feel great," Jobs told the New York Times. "We sold a lot of Macs, but we've sold more iPods in the quarter than all the Macs put together."

I created the Casper project because I needed a way to organize my growing collection of CD-R/RWs which holds a lot of music and images, but there was no such solution available for my OS of choice, the BeOS.

Athene 3.4 is now available for download. The major new feature is backwards compatibility with X11 programs. This is achieved by running a rootless X11 server, the same technique employed by Mac OS X & QNX. The need for a separate window manager has also been eliminated by merging the window management functionality into the server itself. Screenshots demonstrating all this are here and here.

And our winner for the $3000 prize worth of the Aspire Swatter (Enterprise Edition with 25 client licenses) competition is Amit Bahree and his soon-to-be-published article "Exception Management in .NET". Amit won amidst 6 more submissions. Congratulations Amit!

Microsoft gives its Java virtual machine technology a three-year reprieve in the wake of its antitrust settlement with Sun Microsystems. But don't expect any new MSJVM enhancements. On other Java news, NetBeans IDE 3.6, which includes two-tier J2EE 1.4 support, became generally available today. NetBeans is a pure Java, open source development environment for Windows, *nix and MacOSX.

Opera software releases today the new Opera 7.50 preview version for Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris (*nix), Mac OS X and Windows. Elsewhere, OmniGroup recently released OmniWeb 5.0b5 for testing.

Mandrake Linux 10.0 is now available to club members and in packaged sets. According to the press release, "Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official offers the most advanced Linux features currently available. 10.0 Official provides increased performance with Linux kernel 2.6, an enhanced desktop experience with KDE 3.2, GNOME 2.4 and Mandrakegalaxy II, unbeatable hardware recognition, and support for Serial ATA, USB2 and IEEE 1394." The Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official FTP tree will be released this week, and public ISO images will be released later.

According to the latest press release, Lindows, Inc. has changed the name of LindowsOS to "Linspire." Although rumors suggested that the name change was only for use abroad, the press release suggests that the name change is both permanent and all encompassing.

I wanted to write something about the great progress being carried on linux as OS of choice for a professional Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) since a long time. With the inclusion of the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) into the 2.6 kernels, time has come to extend my experiences to all of you.

Despite the growing success of the Open Source movement, most of the general public continues to feel that Open Source software is inaccessible to them. This paper discusses five fundamental problems with the current Open Source software development trend, explores why these issues are holding the movement back, and offers solutions that might help overcome these problems.

Just when you think you've got your developer tools all sorted out, a fresh crop is sure to emerge. This article uses a real-world example to introduce you to two of the most exciting new technologies for the enterprise. Hibernate is an object-relation mapping tool and Spring is an AOP framework and IOC container. Follow along as it shows you how to combine the two to build a transactional persistence tier for your enterprise applications and write code that is database-vendor agnostic, and that can run inside of a J2EE container or run standalone.