A few days ago, John Perry Barlow twetted a series of Adult Principles, and I enjoyed reading them. When he was asked where they came from, he said:

They're from a list I assembled for myself on the eve of my 30th birthday. Many years ago.

This is the collected set from his twitter feed:

Adult Principle #1: Be patient. No matter what.

Adult Principle #2: Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn't say to him.

Adult Principle #3: Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you.

Adult Principle #4 Expand your sense of the possible.

Adult Principle #5 Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.

Adult Principle #6 Don't ask more of others than you can deliver yourself.

Adult Principle #7 Tolerate ambiguity.

Adult Principle #8 Laugh at yourself frequently.

Adult Principle #9 Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right.

Adult Principle #10 Try not to forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong.

Adult Principle #11 Give up blood sports.

Adult Principle #12 Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Don't risk it frivolously.

Adult Principles #13 Never lie to anyone for any reason. (Lies of omission are sometimes exempt.)

Adult Principle #14 Learn the needs of those around you and respect them.

Adult Principle #15 Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.

Adult Principle #16 Reduce your use of the first personal pronoun.

Adult Principle #17 Praise at least as often as you disparage.

Adult Principle #18 Admit your errors freely and quickly.

Adult Principle #19 Become less suspicious of joy.

Adult Principle #20 Understand humility.

Adult Principle #21 Remember that love forgives everything.

Adult Principle #22. Foster dignity.

Adult Principle #23. Live memorably.

Adult Principle #24. Love yourself.

Adult Principle #25. Endure.

A small detour, he also tweeted

If you want a new, improved mate, try treating the one you have better.

Andrew has just released the packages for our first preview of Mono 2.10, we published sources and packages for SLES, OpenSUSE, RHEL, Windows and MacOS X here:

http://mono.ximian.com/monobuild/preview/download-preview

From our draft release notes, here are some of the highlights in this release:

• SGen Precise Stack Scanning and many performance improvements.
• New Profiler engine
• Google Native Client Support
• Faster socket stack
• Improved Parallel Framework
• Cecil/Light
• New C# Compiler backend (can now use any custom mscorlib)
• VB Compiler can now compile to both 2.0 and 4.0 profiles.

As well as containing a pile of bug fixes.

As I mentioned last year, we are moving to a faster release schedule to get important features out for our users faster. For instance, our SGen garbage collector has been vastly improved and should perform better under load, and our ParallelFX got some real-life testing which helped us improve it significantly.

SGen Technical Discussion

Mark has been blogging the technical details about the architecture of the SGen garbage collector, you can read the documents here:

• Introduction to SGen
• SGen's Nursery
• SGen's Major Collectors

Since the beginning of time, men have sought to find a way of creating a sandbox for untrusted code running on their Mono virtual machine.

Those of you familiar with Silverlight's security system, commonly referred as CoreCLR Security, have wondered "how can I get me some of dat". Today Sebastien wrote a How-to guide for those of you interested in creating your own secure sandboxes like Moonlight or Unity3D have done.

From his blog:

So what was missing was not facts but orientation. It kind of make sense, most people are not doing an open source implementation of Silverlight, we are. However we're providing a lot of cool (yes it is ;-) stuff within - stuff, like coreclr, xaml, the cecil-based linker... that can be reused in other projects. So the missing piece is an how to for people wishing to enable CoreCLR when embeding mono in their own application. It does not bring a lot of new facts but, hopefully, it will order them in a more useful way.

During today's Nvidia press conference at CES, a the Monodroid-powered DeltaEngine was shown running the SoulCraft Tech Demo:
CES Video.

Although today's demo was powered by MonoDroid the engine is a cross-platform .NET game engine, it runs on on Mono-powered systems like Linux, MacOS X, MonoTouch and MonoDroid as well as Microsoft .NET powered systems like the XBox360, Windows Phone 7 and Windows:

If you have an iPad, you can try the Zombie Party game on the AppStore, it is the first game powered by DeltaEngine. ExDream is the group behind DeltaEngine.

For information on how the demo was built check out this blog post. The engine will be open sourced this year.

Now that we feel that we have fixed all the embarrassing bugs in Mono for Android, so we have opened up our Mono for Android preview program to anyone that wants to take it out for a spin.

Mono for Android brings the full Mono VM to Android. We use a library profile that is better suited for mobile devices, so we removed features that are not necessary (like the entire System.Configuration stack, just like Silverlight does).

In addition to bringing the core ECMA VM to Android, we bound the entire set of Android Dalvik APIs to C# and in the process C#-ified them. This includes using C# properties for metadata (less XML config file messing around), exposing C# events, C# properties, strongly typed generic types where necessary, implicit conversions where needed, using the C# API style, IEnumerable where appropriate (to let you LINQ over your Dalvik, and we turn IIterable into IEnumerables for you).

On the OpenGL front, we brought the same OpenTK library that is popular among .NET developers on both Windows, Linux and iPhone, so you can share the same OpenGL logic across all platforms.

Unlike iOS where the JIT is not supported, Mono on Android supports the full JIT, so you can use Reflection.Emit and dynamic code compilation as much as you want.

This initial release only comes with templates for C#, but other .NET compilers should work, as long as they reference Mono for Android's libraries (as we removed a few methods that make no sense on mobile devices).

Support for OSX

Through the lifetime of our preview program, Mono for Android only supported Windows development using Visual Studio. Today we are also releasing support for developing Android applications on MacOS X using MonoDevelop.

Getting Started

Please check our Welcome page, it contains installation instructions, links to tutorials, mailing lists, chat rooms and more.

I strongly advise our users to join our mailing list and to check the previous discussions on the mailing list for some tasty insights.

You can also browse the API that we expose to C# developers.

Upcoming Features

We are working as fast and as hard as we can to complete Mono for Android. This includes Linux support and bringing MonoDevelop to Windows, for users that can not run Visual Studio 2010 Professional.

Giving us Feedback

Please provide your feedback on the product directly on our mailing list, as this is what the MonoDroid developers monitor. Bug reports should be filed on Novell's Bugzilla.