Those who develop on Windows will be familiar with Microsoft Visual Studio Express edition products. For the rest, the Express editions are free versions of Microsoft’s popular Visual Studio development suite. The Express editions include a basic IDE and compilers for creating Windows applications. There are express editions available for C++, C#, Basic, and web development.These are great tools for starting developers to create apps for Windows that have been compiled using Microsoft’s own tools. These compilers are used by most popular software including open source software such as Firefox, Python etc. For the many developers working on these open source products, Visual Studio Express is often the only way. It appears that in the next iteration of Visual Studio, the Express...

GitHub has been offering an official GitHub app for Mac OSX from quite a while now, and now they have launched one for Windows as well. Git on Windows has never been as well supported as it has been on Linux, however now with an official client for Windows there is a good set of tools including a GUI for Windows as well. The new GitHub app features all the Git command line tools, and even comes with support for PowerShell — which is Microsoft’s answer to Linux’s much better command line shell. With its integration with PowerShell it can offer auto-completions for Git commands, making it much simpler to use via the command line. While it does offer integration with PowerShell, one can also optionally use the standard command line, Git Bash, or even a custom command line...

With both Tizen and Android being open platforms, there is an opportunity to enable running applications of one platform on another. RIM took this approach with the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, which can run Android apps that were recompiled for the platform. ACL or Android Compatibility Layer by OpenMobile offers a similar solution for Tizen. It adds support for running any Android application in its unmodified state without the need for recompilation. Unlike BlueStacks, which allows running Android applications on Windows, this is a not a software one can download on their Tizen device to make it compatible with Android. If an OEM wishes to provide support for Android, they can modify the kernel and add support for Android applications in the very core. Android has accrued a huge...