Hello all,
I’ll leave the Pixels and rename the blog “Into the bits” for today. I’d like to bring to your attention 3 neat initiatives our SDK team pulled out lately. I’m really pleased to announce that they are not tied to a specific 3ds Max release and are really targeted in helping out our little plugin developer community.

1. PDB servers

Wish you could have 3ds Max’s debug symbols? Wish no more! Developers may now lock on 3ds Max 2012’s stripped symbols which will help speed up any 3ds Max plugin debugging work. The server is located at http://symbols.autodesk.com/symbols. You need to connect this link to your IDE. Christopher Diggins, our SDK documentation expert goes at great lengths explaining all the details on his blog. 

2. open source plugin community

You have 3ds Max plugins you do not wish to support anymore but feel someone could beneficiate from it? You have bits of knowledge you’d like to share? Let`s work together and put some of our brains in this open source repository all can contribute to.
You will see we’ve started with the SDK template generator, a tool that often lacked our attention. I wish I had this repository around in my SDK support years. I’ve written so many snippets of code I just threw away fault of time to finish them.

http://code.google.com/p/3ds-max-dev/

3. "MaxSharp" .net exposure of the 3ds Max SDK

I’m a bit late here, but nevertheless, it`s worth noting our SDK team’s prototype work on a .net SDK.
A .net exposure to the Max SDK provides plugin developers access to last generation language features such as garbage collection and reflection while built-in libraries facilitate common tasks such as building user interfaces, connecting to databases, parsing XML and text, numerical computation, and communicating over networks.
The language currently supported through the .net exposure : C#, F#, IronPython, IronRuby, and Visual Basic .NET.

• Christopher Diggins explains everything on his blog
• David Cunningham presented an impressive class at AU 2010 just about that. Sadly the recording did not work out. The handouts may help grasp most of it.

Let me know what you guys think!