Displaying a message box in an iPhone application is something I have to look up almost every time. I decided it was time to create a tutorial on the subject - then maybe I'd actually remember the syntax. This tutorial will be short, but should cover pretty much everything you'd need to know in order to show alerts in an iPhone application.

Learning to program is hard and one of the ways to make the process easier is by reading and using books. With our book reviews here at Switch On The Code we try to help you figure out which books are the best for any level of developer. In this review I'm going to go over the iOS game programming book Learning Cocos2D - A Hands-On Guide to Building iOS Games with Cocos2D, Box2D, and Chipmunk. written by Rod Strougo and Ray Wenderlich.

It's been a while since we've done a book review, and it's time to rectify that. In this installment I'll be reviewing The Big Nerd Ranch's Guide to iOS Programming (2nd Edition). The Big Nerd Ranch has created a series of books around Mac, iOS, and Objective-C programming. This book is the latest in that series.

A few weeks ago, we here at Paranoid Ferret released a physics based puzzle game named Drop & Lock. It is not only fun, but extremely addicting. We would just like to take a quick break and tell (and show) you all the cool things that this new iPhone puzzler has to offer.

This is something that I expected to be straightforward - binding a DataTable to a WPF DataGrid. The problem is that DataTable doesn't implement IEnumerable, and unfortunately that's what the DataGrid's ItemsSource property requires.

After ruining a disk attempting to burn an ISO image, I thought it might be a good idea to share with everyone else how to correctly burn an image to a CD or DVD on a Mac. My first attempt consisted of right mouse clicking on the .iso file and selecting "Burn 'myImage.iso' to Disk..." This, of course, was taken a bit too literally by OSX and instead of receiving a disk with the contents of my image, I received a disk that contained the image file itself.

I'm proud to announce that we just launched a new iPhone application called Image to Ascii. It's a fun little tool that you can use to transform images into ascii pieces of art. We also launched the Image to Ascii Website, which has a little more information on the application and some great examples.

Today concludes Nokia's Qt 2010 Developer Days. As an attendee, I'd say the conference was a success. Like many conferences, this one was split into tracks and sessions. One track was dedicated to technical information and the other was full of people from the community demonstrating how they've used Qt to solve their problems. As someone new to Qt, I found the conference to be extremely valuable and informative.

Every now and then I get to work on some really cool stuff at HyperQuake. Today HyperQuake launched something I have been working on (with others) to create, the BirdBot Factory. The basic idea is that you can design your own paper craft robot bird - tell me that isn't sweet.

XNA is quite possibly one of the most robust game programming frameworks out there. You can do nearly anything with it, and one of the reasons it is so flexible is its "Content Pipeline". But sometimes it can be a bit tricky to use this feature, requiring us to do bit more work. But in the end, it helps to use the Content Pipeline. Luckily today we are going over how to use it to load in some XML.