"I have often heard this and I just can't figure out where this whole "Visual Studio is the best IDE ever" stuff comes from or if people are serious when they say it."

It comes from me. And I'm serious.

This is directly opposed to all of Capitalist society. Beware the Curse of the Pigeon!

Drunk History Vol. 6 - Nikola Tesla
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gOR91oentQ

And now Google has just announced an Android event on the exact same day as the Nokia Lumia/Windows Phone 8 release. Google knows who's *not* in charge.

Apple, care to give MS the finger too and move your iPad Mini release date up by a few days?

Google 'opens the playground' for an Android event October 29th
http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/17/google-android-nexus-event-october-29th/

I meant Microsoft developer.

I'm surprised you didn't also write: "Ah ha! iPHone? You sure? There was never a product named iPHone. It's iPhone. Besides, 'H' is ASCII 72 and 'h' is ASCII 104. That's a full difference of 32 decimals. I hereby declare your entire entire post to be invalid and I challenge you to a duel!"

Microsoft is acting like they number one in the mobile market, but the fact is they're not even in the game yet or even a player in the sub-mobile markets and they're making some huge mistakes. I've been a .NET developer for 16 years and I'm seriously pulling for them, but the last 6 months have been full of Microsoft making ridiculous decisions. I almost think that Google and Apple paid top executives at Microsoft to screw up this Windows Phone 8 launch as badly as humanly possible.

Microsoft refuses to release the beta or alpha of the Windows Phone 8 SDK to developers unless they pay a $99 fee and even then the SDK is released on a lottery basis. Come on, seriously? MS needs people to write software for for WP8 NOW, not later. So at the very least if they're going to act like they're relevant and charge developers $99 for the privilege to write software for their currently-non-existant device with 0% market share they should at least give those developers the SDK... which leads to my next complaint:

$99 to develop for a device with 0% market share? Microsoft, are you joking? You should be begging developers to write software for WP8 and maybe een giving them a full copy of VS 2012, bot charging them $99. Big mistake.

The Nokia Lumia 900 is a heavy brick. Cool specs and everything, but it's a brick.

And lastly...

Nokia gave AT&T exclusive rights to provide cellular service to the Lumia 900. Is this a joke? Every other mobile maker is going away from exclusivity. Maybe MS could get away with this is WP8 and the Lumia 900 were some world-changing revolutionary device, but come on. WP8 is cool, it's got some great stuff, but it's not anywhere near the same as when Apple released the iPHone in 1997 and gave AT&T exclusivity.

Microsoft has some great stuff going for it: an awesome Visual Studio IDE that blows away XCode and Eclipse and they have a huge foothold in the business market. Tons of businesses have invested heavily is MS infrastructure and developer talent and would be much more likely to do mobile dev projects if Microsoft could get their mobile strategy even 1/2 right.

But as a developer with a passion for mobile dev I'm obviously pretty discouraged about their mobile strategy in the immediate future right now.

All current tablets and smartphones are made for consuming, not creating. That's the purpose of these devices. The IT staff for this school system should have known that.

I'd work free for three weeks to avoid having to live in Florida.

Yet another way Democrats and Republicans have devised to drive voters to register (and vote) as independents. Let's hope this trend keeps up!

I just read this story on CNN.com and got pretty discouraged. So, I came to Slashdot to read something interesting and see that this is on the main page.

Time to turn off the computer and turn on the stereo.

Some people say that Agile is awesome when fully implemented, but I've never seen that done. Or met anyone that seen that done. It's kind of like Big Foot.

Thanks

It would be nice to get a source every once in a while when people start throwing out numbers and "facts"

Thanks MPAA, I hadn't heard of this software, so I just grabbed a copy. Works great!

Posting it to my server now.

This big difference between what you and I are are saying is that humans, people and money are all physical things. Good, evil, Heaven, Hell, God and the Devil are all ideas and beliefs.

Exactly, there are no neutral actions. I left out the word "morally" since it's very definition is the distinction between "good" and "evil".