I'm presenting on Mono and Moonlight at the Dallas Tech Fest at 2:00p this afternoon.

Dallas Tech Fest is going to be a pretty cool event, so I'm sure you're already registered.  Tim Rayburn and his fellow organizers have done an excellent job of assembling a diverse set of topics, as well as interesting speakers.  The event will be going on all day today at the Addison Conference and Theatre Center.

If you need further incentive to attend the show (or at least my talk), the guys over at Telligent have given me access to a few Graffiti CMS licenses to hand out, in order to promote their support for Mono.  If you want a copy (particularly if you're interested in running it on Mono), please come ask me for a copy in advance so I don't have to come up with some sort of quiz-show approach to handing them out during my talk.

Currently, I'm sitting in Boston Logan Airport, so I'm a little bummed that I'm going to miss out on hearing my good friend, Jason Hudgins, present on Android at 8:30a .  If you make it out to the event earlier enough to catch his talk, I'm sure you'll be entertained by his Android Developer Challenge war stories, and perhaps he'll finally be willing to share some information about what they're doing over at his secretive Droid Works startup.

Unfortunately, I know it's a little short notice for anyone that is reading this to come; however, if you're interested, I'll be speaking at 9:10 tomorrow morning.  If you're in the area, but can't make it (or wake up) in time for my talk, I hope you'll swing by and say "Hi" to me sometime anyways.  It looks like there are several other good talks scheduled over both days to make the event worth attending.

More events upcoming on the calendar soon.  I'll make an effort to post about them with a little more notice.

If you've been following the unfolding story on Miguel's blog then you may be aware that Mono provides some pretty interesting advantages over traditional embedded scripting engines.

Game Development with Unity

This has lead Mono to be used for handling game logic, AI, etc, in games and game engines, as well as simulations.

So, with all of the excitement this has drawn (primarily from Miguel's blog posts), we decided it would be worthwhile to engage the greater game developer community. If you are considering scripting options for your current or next game, or just want to figure out how to deal with your scripting performance problems, we hope you will swing by and say "Hi."

Also, there is a lot more functionality in Mono than just our runtime, so if you are at the GDC and want to discuss some other topics (for instance Moonlight or Mono on the Mac), we're happy to talk about those things, too.

If you're not going to be able to make it out to the conference, but are still interested in embedding Mono, you can read about Scripting with Mono, Embedding Mono, and Licensing Mono.

MonoDevelop running on the openSUSE 10.3 VM

This release includes several notable improvements:

1. It's based on openSUSE 10.3, which offers many improvements over 10.2 that have certainly been expressed elsewhere.
2. It comes in both VMWare image and Live CD form. This is thanks to the power of Kiwi, whose scripts have made the process much more repeatable. This should also allow future releases to more closely track Mono releases.
3. It includes many additional demo applications, including gbrainy, gnome-do, and several new ASP.NET 2.0 applications.

The inclusion of the above mentioned applications is made easy by the openSUSE build service. If you'd like to run any of the apps included on the image on your local machine, you should be able find them by adding the url to the Mono:Community on OBS repository for your distro to your system's package manager sources.

If you know of an open source Mono or .NET project you would like to see included on future images, the first step would be to get it packaged on the build service. Please let me know if you need help, or would just like to recommend an application.

With this release, the official images now provide everything that I wanted Mono Live to provide, and much more, so I'm relieved to no longer feel the weight of that project over my head.

Big thanks to Andrew Jorgensen for pulling this release together (and accepting all of my input from my initial attempt to do this work for Mono Live), as well as Thomas, Mark, Rusty, and Wade for their testing and feedback.