DevTopics

ComponentArt is hosting the 2009 Summer Silverlight Coding Competition.  Author of the best application as selected by their expert panel and the community will receive a grand prize of $10,000 USD.  Authors of the two runner-up applications will each receive ComponentArt licenses (a $1,299 USD value).

Applicants are not required to use ComponentArt’s products to enter the competition.   Community voting opens on July 7, 2009.  Expert Panel judging starts at the end of September, so you can continue improving your app until then.

Silverlight Coding Competition

TheDailyWTF describes how poor database design and user error bankrupted a small chain of pet stores.

“MegaPetCo” was upset that its website ran incredibly slow.  Consultant Rick discovered MegaPetCo was using a single shared database for its website and everything else in its business — sales, payroll, HR, inventory, tax records, invoices and maintenance tickets.  The database was incredibly simple: a single table with hundreds of columns.  It probably had humble beginnings as a spreadsheet and organically grew into a vast monolith over the seven years that MegaPetCo was in business.  All told, the database had millions of rows in a single table.

Then one day a developer was optimizing the database and removing records that MegaPetCo no longer needed.  All it took was a single, poorly-formed delete query to wipe out each and every row in the database table.  MegaPetCo’s sales immediately ground to a halt, along with everything else in the company.  And of course — you guessed it — there were no backups.

Within a few months, the company filed for bankruptcy and was forced to close every one of its stores, laying off several hundred people along the way.

Read the story
More Stupid Stuff

Systemax Inc., a leading multi-channel retailer of computers, electronics, and industrial products, has purchased the Circuit City brand, trademark, website and other assets.

They’ve recently launched the all-new CircuitCity.com website, which offers values on a huge inventory of brand name computer & electronics products, at what they claim are the most affordable prices in the industry.

Hopefully this won’t be the same “affordable prices” that Circuit City offered its customers during its going-out-of-business sale.  Although most items were 40-50% off, this was based on hyper-inflated retail prices, which meant that Circuit City’s sale prices were often higher than what you could find at Best Buy or Amazon.com.  I was able to find a few good deals at the time, but most items were picked-over expensive crap with no return policy.

The new CircuitCity.com features low everyday prices, world-class 24/7 customer service (because they haven’t fired their experienced staff yet, as did the old Circuit City), and a wide selection of products.  You’ll also enjoy advanced search capabilities and enhanced content, which includes photo galleries and videos of thousands of the most popular consumer electronics and computer products & accessories.

Microsoft has announced retail pricing for Windows 7 that includes an option to preorder the operating system at a substantial discount. 

From today through July 11, U.S. consumers can preorder an upgrade from XP or Vista to Windows 7 Home premium for $49 or Windows 7 Professional for $99.  However, XP customers must do a clean installation of Windows 7.

Also starting today, buyers of new PCs with Vista installed will receive a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it becomes available.

Retail boxed copies of Windows 7 go on sale October 22.  Microsoft plans to charge $119 for Home Premium, $199 for Professional, and $219 for Ultimate.

In Europe, the EU’s anti-trust ruling has forced Microsoft to ship a special “E” version with the Internet Explorer web browser removed.  Therefore, the European launch will be delayed, and all users must perform a clean installation, even if purchasing an upgrade.

Early reviews are generally positive and indicate that Windows 7 is much better behaved than Vista was when it was first released.

Story at CNN

If you create software development tools, you’ll want to consider building on the Visual Studio Shell.  A streamlined Visual Studio development environment, the Visual Studio Shell provides the core foundation so you can focus on building your application’s unique features.  Flexible customization options help you deliver optimized experiences for specific markets.  Note that the Visual Studio Shell is royalty-free for building and deploying applications.

The key benefits of the Visual Studio Shell:

• Faster development. The Visual Studio Shell accelerates development by providing a base integrated development environment that can host custom tools and programming languages.
• A familiar environment. Developers can build on the Visual Studio platform and provide end users a familiar user interface, speeding the learning curve for both.
• Optimized for languages and tools. Created in response to requests from our partners, the Visual Studio Shell gives you the option of integrating your tools with Visual Studio or creating an isolated, custom-branded application.

Visual Studio Shell

Last week I purchased a cheeseburger at McDonalds for $1.58.  I handed $2.08 to the young woman behind the counter.  She stood there, holding the nickel and 3 pennies, while staring blankly at her register.  I sensed her discomfort and tried to tell her to just give me back two quarters, but she hailed the manager for help.  While he tried to explain the transaction to her, she started crying in frustration.  Why do I tell you this?  Because of the evolution in teaching math in the United States over the past six decades:

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This is part 10 in a series of articles on obscure programming languages.

What is JADE?

JADE is an object-oriented software development platform.  It has its own programming language that seamlessly integrates an application server and object-oriented database management system.  JADE also provides APIs for other languages such as .NET, Java, C/C++ and Web services.

As a programming language, JADE’s main competitors are Java and C#, while as a database it competes with other object-oriented databases and post-relational databases such as Versant, Caché and Matisse, as well as with traditional relational database software packages such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. 

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Most programmers know that throwing exceptions takes a relatively long time to execute versus normal processing.  Some say throwing exceptions is as much as two orders of magnitude slower than passing arguments (that’s 100 times slower for non-geeks).  However, another article claims there’s almost no impact to throwing exceptions, unless you are running your software in a debugger.

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A Michigan couple decided to go to Florida to thaw out during a particularly icy winter.  They planned to stay at the same hotel where they spent their honeymoon 20 years earlier.

Because of their hectic jobs, it was difficult to coordinate their travel schedules.  So the husband left Michigan and flew to Florida on Thursday, with his wife flying down to join him the following day.

The husband checked into the hotel.  There was a computer in his room, so he decided to send an email to his wife.  However, he accidentally left out one letter in her email address, and without realizing his error, sent the email.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Houston, a widow had just returned home from her husband’s funeral.  He was a minister who was called home to glory following a heart attack.  The widow decided to check her email for messages from relatives and friends.

After reading the first message, the widow screamed and fainted.  Her son rushed into the room, found his mother on the floor, then read the computer screen:

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Want to snoop on your friends’ porn viewing habits?  Then follow these simple steps:

Step 1.  Copy and paste some code into a widget on your website or blog.

Step 2.  Send you friends to the webpage where you put the widget.  Their porn history will be captured in the widget.

Step 3.  See what porn sites your friends have been visiting by looking at the widget you put on your website.

How does this work?  The widget takes advantage of a security leak in the web style sheets (CSS).  Your web browser displays links you have visited in a different color.  The code mentioned above displays a list of porn sites and detects which sites have been visited based on the link color.  The best/worst part of this trick is that will likely never be fixed because it is a fundamental feature of the Web browser.

We installed this on one of our blogs, and it failed to catch any of the porn sites that we’ve visited.  I guess ProgrammersLoveMeganFox.com isn’t considered porn.

I Caught You Watching Porn