Microsoft on Thursday released a software development kit for its Kinect gaming system, and hackers are already testing the limits of what the device can do.

Overstock.com is offering a prize of up to $1 million to computer researchers who come up with a way to improve how the online retailer automatically recommends products to customers.

It's not much bigger than your finger, it looks like a leftover from an electronics factory, but its makers believe their £15 computer could help a new generation discover programming.

Are you a hobbyist game developer with a great idea for the next big thing? Well, Nintendo isn’t interested. This would seem to disqualify breakout hits like current No. 1 App Store game Tiny Wings, created and sold by Andreas Illiger, from appearing on Nintendo 3DS.

This is going to be a big month for tablet developers! The Motorola Xoom is grabbing some nice reviews, and the impending iPad 2 is getting a lot of rotation in the rumor mill. And now, Google's latest Android sweet thing is extremely tablet-centric. Android 3.0, dubbed Honeycomb is now hot in the hands of developers.

A new survey conducted by research firm IDC has revealed that developer interest in Google's Android mobile phone platform may soon overtake that of Apple's iOS.

Apple's App Store may have more apps, but it's Google's Android operating system that is getting more attention from developers, a new survey has revealed.

Regardless of your personal feelings toward Internet porn, the sysadmins overseeing adult websites know a thing or two about scripting and scalability. For example, keep your database clean, embrace open source for as many commodity components as possible, and only use the latest technology if it adds actual value to your site, not just for the sake of using it.

Developer enthusiasm for Apple Inc.'s iPad has cooled somewhat because the tablet lacks multitasking and a camera, a company that makes cross-platform development tools said today.

According to Zero Day Initiative, an initiative founded by TippingPoint which organizes the security competition Pwn2Own, the iPhone has been successfully exploited within minutes of the competition starting.

Give developers the promise of something new to play with and, well, they'll probably start playing. That's the bottom line from Flurry Analytics, who you might remember from their iPad predictions prior to the Apple tablet's launch; they're back with some new app stats, and they're claiming January 2010 saw an almost threefold jump in iPhone OS projects starting.

Developers, some of whom have been frustrated by Google's delay in delivering an SDK, can now test their apps against the latest version of Android

Every operating system has different strengths and weaknesses, sometimes making it daunting for developers of mobile apps.

The world's first universal programmable quantum computer has been put through its paces. But the test program revealed significant hurdles that must be overcome before the device is ready for real work.

Just a day after the developer of the popular iPhone Facebook app turned his back on the project, another high profile developer has walked away from the ecosystem after expressing dismay at the reviews process.

Has Java lost its sparkle? (Did it ever have one?!) Ladies and Gentlemen take your corners please...

The European Commission has issued a ringing endorsement of open source software, producing a confidence-boost for businesses considering the deployment of Linux and other free software.

It isn't easy to write code for Cell, with its central processing core and eight accompanying special-purpose engines. Octopiler, which IBM Research plans to outline at a tutorial next month, aims to change all that. The software development tool converts a single, human-written program into several different programs that run simultaneously on Cell's various cores.

"Programming Cell is relatively hard," said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff, in particular because development tools must must divide software into threads running among different cores and keep those programs synchronized as they run. "Certainly a higher-level, more abstracted model makes programming a lot easier."

When we set out about a year ago to build the Yahoo! User Interface Library, we had a specific set of challenges to address. First and foremost, we wanted to enable our front-end engineers to spend more time working on advanced, product-specific features and less time doing cross-browser tuning of generic interactions like drag and drop.

You can now get your hands on a test version of the next major release of Java. The beta of Java Standard Edition 6, also known as Mustang, includes changes to the way it handles Web services, should deliver better look and feel and tighter security. Mark Reinhold of Sun announced the availability of the Java SE 6 beta on Wednesday.

"In contrast to the source and binary snapshots that we've been shipping for over a year, the formal beta release has been through many weeks of intensive testing — and a tiny little bit of last-minute bug-fixing — in order to produce a release that's somewhat more polished," said Reinhold. "If you've chosen to avoid the riskier snapshot builds then now is the perfect time to have a look at Mustang, make sure your existing code still compiles and runs, and try out the new features," he added.