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If last month's announcements from Microsoft on the new style of programming for Windows 8 made you think that the .NET platform had reached its peak, you might want to take another look at the IT workforce outside Microsoft's window. The latest data from career enhancement services provider Dice.com indicates that, over the last 90 days alone, calls for developers with .NET-related skillsets outnumber available candidates with .NET skills by nearly 7 to 1.

Microsoft is funding a project to make Scala available within the .Net and Mono. The Scala website is running an interview with Miguel Garcia, the developer behind the project.

According to Garcia, you can already use Scala with .Net. There are some limitations now, but he says they will be removed by fall. "If you have a Scala program working on the JVM then for the most part you only need to recompile it with the Scala.Net compiler and it will run there too," he says.

Earlier this month Attachmate laid off the developers working on Mono, an open source implementation of Microsoft .NET sponsored by Novell. Attachmate acquired Novell last year.

Today Mono creator Miguel de Icaza announced the formation of a new startup to support the open source project: Xamarin.

Novell has announced the general availability of Mono for Android today, the solution that lets developers use Windows technologies like C# and .NET to build Android applications. We previously reported on Mono for Android's launch in January of this year, when the preview program opened up for testing after the biggest bugs had been fixed.

Now, Novell is licensing the platform commercially, starting at $399 per developer per year.

Oracle is taking such lengths to control Java's future that companies need to start looking at alternatives such as .NET, Platform-as-a-Service and the Open Web.

In a report issued today, John R. Rymer and Jeffrey S. Hammond of Forrester Research write that Oracle is controlling Java to such an extent that even the Open JDK has little autonomy:

The AppUp developer program launched support for .NET applications by releasing the .NET SDK, along with an IDE Plug-In for Visual Studio 2008. This plug-in reduces development time to integrate the AppUp SDKs and builds the MSI needed to submit your application for distribution and sales via the Intel AppUp Center. The IDE Plug-in supports both the C/C++ and .NET SDK for Microsoft Windows when using Visual Studio 2008.

The AppUp developer program launched support for .NET applications by releasing the .NET SDK, along with an IDE Plug-In for Visual Studio 2008. This plug-in reduces development time to integrate the AppUp SDKs and builds the MSI needed to submit your application for distribution and sales via the Intel® AppUpSM Center. The IDE Plug-in supports both the C/C++ and .NET SDK for Microsoft Windows* when using Visual Studio 2008.

With the .NET SDK and support now available for the Intel AppUp developer program, here's a brief overview of the SDK's technical components, along with five quick steps to add the.NET SDK to Visual Studio 2008.

In the game of baseball, pitchers and batters are continually making adjustments to improve their chances against each other. If a batter stikes out, he can learn from the pitches he saw and have a better chance of connecting in his next appearance at the plate. The same is true for entrepreneurs in the startup game.

Second generation entrepreneurs (or any employee of a startup, for that matter) can review past decisions in hopes of hitting one out of the park with their next startup. Adam D'Angelo is a former employee of Facebook where he learned valuable lessons - like choosing the right programming language - that helped him launch his very own startup, the Q&A service Quora.

China's top-level domain has now surpassed .net as the web's third most popular top-level and second most popular country-specific domain, according to a study by VeriSign says the Associated Press. VeriSign said that registrations of .cn domains had surged 23% in the first quarter of this year, and tripled year-over-year. China's domain boom is a sign of the country's growing importance on the web and rapidly expanding Internet user base.