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UPDATE:  Google has restored Thomas’ service and data.  It turns out that Google had a very good reason to suspend Thomas’ account.  However, Google will be reviewing its policies to hopefully be more transparent and allow for appeals.

Thomas Monopoly is having a really bad week.  Thomas (real name Dylan M.) was a Google fan: he owned Google stock, paid for Google storage, and had moved nearly his entire digital world to the Google cloud.  Then Thomas allegedly did something wrong, and Google terminated his digital life. 

Google accused Thomas of violating its Terms of Service and apparently killed his entire online presence.  Thomas lost his website, email accounts, banking info, student records, 7 years of correspondence, 4,800 photographs and videos, 200 contacts, 500 articles saved for scholarship purposes, Google Voice messages, all his bookmarks, documents, backups, calendar with doctor’s appointments and important meetings, community calendars, medical records, and some very important notes.

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SUSE, an Attachmate Business Unit, and Xamarin, a startup co-founded by Mono legend Miguel de Icaza, are partnering to provide continued support for Mono, the open-source .NET Framework.  The agreement grants Xamarin a broad, perpetual license to all intellectual property covering Mono, MonoTouch, Mono for Android, and Mono Tools for Visual Studio.  Xamarin will assume support for these products and continue to develop and sell them.  Existing customers can purchase upgrades.  Priority support is also available for an extra fee.

Xamarin’s immediate plans for both MonoTouch and Mono for Android is to make sure that the major bugs are fixed.  I just received notification today that a critical bug open in MonoTools since last October has finally been assigned to be fixed.  This is excellent news for .NET developers and provides further evidence that .NET isn’t dead.  Xamarin provides the best way to build fast, native .NET apps on iOS and Android.

SUSE/Xamarin Press Release
Announcement by Miguel de Icaza

I saw the James Cameron movie Titanic again the other night.  In the scene shown above, the band plays on with grace and dignity, while the ship slowly sinks, and all hell breaks loose around them.

That’s when it hit me: .NET developers face a similar fate.  Do we ride Microsoft .NET to the bottom of the icy Atlantic, or try to jump on one of the HTML5+JavaScript lifeboats?  Or perhaps more likely, .NET isn’t really sinking after all, and this controversy is just another molehill made into a mountain by the frenzied blogosphere.

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DotNetBaby says, “I’m an expert on sucking, and I can assure you that C# doesn’t suck.”

YourLanguageSucks is a wiki on theory.org that lists reasons why the most popular programming languages suck.  There are long lists of reasons why Java, JavaScript, C++ and PHP suck.  But the list for C# is very short:

• Supports ‘goto’.
• Two distinct sets of collections: non-generic and generic.  Stack and Queue have the same name in both their generic and non-generic flavors, but then we have Hashtable (non-generic) and Dictionary (generic).

The first reason is easy to discount: just avoid using goto!  The second reason is valid, but not really an issue if you use only generic collections, as I do.

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If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.  This seems to be Microsoft’s new mantra for mobile. 

Microsoft missed the initial smartphone wave in spite of having a decade head start with Windows Mobile and the Pocket PC.  Now Microsoft is playing a hurried game of catchup with Windows Phone 7. 

But the immediate future is not looking good for Windows Phone.  The most recent data from comScore shows that Microsoft’s share of smartphone subscribers is only 6% and continues to fall.  Whereas Android’s share is 38% and rising at a fast clip.  Apple’s 27% share of smartphone subscribers is also growing, though at a slower rate.

The Android explosion is not all bad news for Microsoft, however.  MobileCrunch reports that Microsoft is earning 5 times more revenue from its patents on components of the Android operating system than it is from Windows Phone.  That’s $150 million from Android versus $30 million from Windows Phone.

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