In case you haven’t been following the news around Microsoft’s purchase of Xamarin here is some exciting news. When this merger was first announced we were excited to see Microsoft commit to the Xamarin toolset as well as being hopeful that the business editions would become part of the MSDN collection of software (and thus save us about $2,000 per developer). What we weren’t expecting was for Microsoft to make Xamarin a standard part of Visual Studio, available to all Visual Studio developers. Not just MSDN or retail licensed developers, but all developers, including Visual Studio Community Edition.

This is a big deal for us and other companies wanting to do cross-platform mobile development with C# and .NET. Not only have our expenses been drastically reduced to continue to use the toolsets we love, but now the conversation about working with internal resources at a client to maintain, augment, or otherwise work with this product just got a lot easier. We no longer need to sell them on buying on of their developers a $2000/yr subscription to be able to work with the source we deliver them.

Hopefully this will entice other developers to take their apps to .NET and hopefully that will get their apps on Windows Phone and give it some traction in the market.

In addition to all this already great news, they have also announced that the Xamarin codebase will be open sourced and made available through GitHub. I think we can expect some great community driven improvements coming to Xamarin.Forms as those of us who have been working with it get our hands on the source.

This is a great time to be a .NET developer, and an even better time to be a .NET cross-platform mobile developer.

You can read more details about the announcements on Xamarin’s blog.

Over the weekend Duane released Bluff v1.1

Bluff is an Open Source project that aims to bring useful automation and productivity commands to users of Sony Vegas Pro. It is an extension built against the Sony Vegas Pro 8 extensibility API and should be compatible with user of Sony Vegas Pro 8-13. If you would like to contribute to Bluff, then check out the GitHub project.

New to this version:

• We added a new Command: Arrange Events By Created Timestamp.
• We now have an official MSI installer.
• We made some changes under the hood by updating the project to .NET 3.5 and converting all the User Interface to WPF.
• We started building the official release against the Vegas Pro 8 DLL for better compatibility.

You can get the current release of Bluff here: https://github.com/AlienArc/VegasBluff/releases/latest

You can find more details on Duane's blog post about the release..

Announcing the first official release of our Open Source project Bluff

Bluff is an Open Source project to help make you look like you know what you are doing in Sony Vegas Pro. Developed using the Vegas Pro extension model, it takes you a step beyond what can easily be done inside a standard script. Developed initially to help create some custom video effects for internal and personal video projects. We thought it would be useful to other content producers out there and would like to see it improved by the community.

Bluff currently adds several useful commands to assist your video production process, including:

• Create Video Wall
• Order Events by Name and In Time
• Randomize Events
• Convert Markers to Regions
• Reorder Markers
• Split Region

Bluff requires Sony Vegas Pro, has been tested and built against Sony Vegas Pro 12, and should also work with version 13.

The official release binaries and installation instructions can be found on our GitHub Release page.

If you would like to contribute head over to the repository and fork the project today.