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So you've started playing around with Unity and discovered this "Mono" thing. Well, Mono things. MonoDevelop, the Mono Runtime, the Mono compiler. Mono, Mono, Mono. If you're completely in the dark as to the differences between these elements, well, it's time to learn.

In Microsoft and Unity's continuing efforts to make life easier for game developer, the latter has finally integrated Visual Studio debugging into its IDE, meaning users will no longer have to separately install the Unity Tools extension -- it'll just work out of the box.

Microsoft may have long-retired XNA, its .NET-based game development framework, but it's still very much supporting games developers. Last year it released the Community Edition of Visual Studio, essentially a "full version" of its programming IDE for hobbyist and professionals alike, as well as Unity Tools for Visual Studio. Now it's partnered with Epic, Unity and Chukong Technologies (Cocos2d) to more deeply integrate these technologies into Visual Studio.

Microsoft regularly operates in mysterious ways (Windows 8, anyone?) with one of its more intriguing -- and recent -- manoeuvres being the acquisition of SyntaxTree. The company is best known for UnityVS, a Visual Studio extension that allows developers to debug games created with Unity 3D in Redmond's popular IDE. A month after SyntaxTree's integration into the mothership, Microsoft has released an updated version of UnityVS, renaming it to "Visual Studio Tools for Unity" (VSTU), while also removing the $US99+ price tag.

Previously, we've looked at simple multi-threading in C#. Today, we're going to take a quick look at reflection, a feature of C# (and many other languages) that allows you to "look" at your code at run-time and do all sorts of tricky things with it.

For XNA, Microsoft's managed runtime for game developers, the writing was on the wall -- or textured quad -- when the company announced that C++/DirectX and Javascript/HTML5 would be the preferred platforms for games development in Windows 8. Now Microsoft has finally signed off on the API, where should developers be focusing their efforts?

Ubuntu 12.04 is coming in April, but eager users can check out the beta version today. "Precise Pangolin" includes a new quick search feature called the HUD, some new privacy settings and a few tweaks to the Unity interface.

If you aren't a fan of Ubuntu's new "Unity" interface, weblog OMG! Ubuntu! shows us how to get the old GNOME 2-style look back with just a few tweaks (and without having to downgrade).

Ubuntu's Unity interface is sleek, simple, and effective at keeping things uncluttered on your desktop, but some users may not be so keen on having to jump through hoops just to open one of their home folder's subdirectories in a real file manager. Luckily, there's a fix for that.