May 20
Documentation for the next generation of the Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is now publicly available at MSDN.
May 20
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is now available for MSDN Subscribers. Visual Studio 2010 is a complete suite of tools for building both desktop and team-based enterprise Web applications. In addition to building high-performing desktop applications, you can use Visual Studio’s powerful component-based development tools and other technologies to simplify team-based design, development, and deployment of enterprise solutions.
Visual Studio 2010 Product Highlights
MSDN Subscribers Download
May 18
Since terrorists have no problem violating the human rights of innocent citizens, it’s difficult to imagine a terrorist being dissuaded by Google’s App Engine Terms of Service:
2. Your Account and Use of the Service
2.1. You must provide accurate and complete registration information any time you register to use the Service. You are responsible for the security of your passwords and for any use of your account. If you become aware of any unauthorized use of your password or of your account, you agree to notify Google immediately.
2.2. Your use of the Service must comply with all applicable laws, regulations and ordinances, including any laws regarding the export of data or software. You agree not to use the Service in the design, development, production, or use of missiles or the design, development, production, stockpiling, or use of chemical or biological weapons.
May 14
Dealing another significant blow to the Microsoft Silverlight web development platform, the New York Times is abandoning Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Rob Larson from the New York Times writes:
Next week we’ll be introducing Times Reader 2.0. This version is powered by Adobe AIR and will run equally well on Windows, Mac and Linux computers. With this latest release, Times Reader resembles the printed paper even more closely, and it updates every five minutes with the latest news from the Web.
The timing is awkward to say the least, with Microsoft actively promoting its New York Times Silverlight Kit. This toolkit enables developers to use the Times’ APIs with little or no coding, instead using mostly XAML.
May 06
Influenza, commonly referred to as the flu, is an infectious disease caused by a virus that affects birds and mammals. The most common symptoms of the flu are chills, fever, sore throat, muscle pains, severe headache, coughing, weakness and general discomfort. In more serious cases, the flu can lead to pneumonia, which can be fatal, particularly for the young and the elderly.
There’s a lot of hype and concern now about the new H1N1 swine flu and the possibility for a global pandemic. It appears the swine flu is currently no worse than the regular flu, but health officials worry that the swine flu will reemerge with the autumn flu season even stronger than today.
If there’s a problem in the world, we can always count on one or more innovative computer scientists trying to solve the problem with software. Here’s a collection of software for analyzing and treating the flu:
May 05
Microsoft has just released the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1): Release Candidate (RC).
The Microsoft Windows SDK is a set of tools, code samples, documentation, compilers, headers, and libraries that developers can use to create applications that run on Microsoft Windows operating systems. The Windows SDK combines two formerly separate SDKs: the Platform SDK (PSDK) and the .NET Framework SDK.
The following is a small sampling of what’s new or updated in this SDK:
- Documentation – Approximately 80% of the SDK documentation set has been refreshed
- Headers/Libraries – numerous new and updated – please see What’s New in the Windows API under the top-level Getting Started section in the documentation
- Samples – Over 200 new and/or updated samples
- Tools – Several new tools added
- Visual Studio 2008 SP1 C++ command line compiler toolset and matching CRT
May 05
Shamus Young is a software engineer who has created a nighttime cityscape that is “mostly made of lights and suggestions rather than real detail.” The city is entirely procedurally-generated, meaning the the program will contain no art assets such as bitmaps, textures or models — everything must be built from scratch at startup. The result is an amazingly realistic live model:
May 04
Bjarne Stroustrup is a Danish-born computer scientist and the College of Engineering Chair Professor of Computer Science at Texas A&M University. He is most notable for developing the C++ programming language. But many English speakers fumble at pronouncing his name.
A rough English pronunciation would be "B-yar-ne Strov-stroop". Or you can listen here to how Stroustrup himself pronounces his name.
Apr 30
This is part 9 in a series of articles on obscure programming languages.
What is Io?
Io is a small, prototype-based programming language. The ideas in Io were inspired by Smalltalk (all values are objects, all messages are dynamic), Self (prototype-based, eliminating the distinction between instance and class), NewtonScript (differential inheritance), Act1 (actors and futures for concurrency), LISP (code is a runtime inspectable/modifiable tree) and Lua (small, embeddable).
Apr 21
Let’s face it: computer programmers became cool with the dot-com wave. It wasn’t just the Artist-Formerly-Known-as-Prince who was partying in 1999, it was all those pimple-faced anonymous geeks who built the Netscapes, Googles and other.coms of the world.
Thanks to these successful entrepreneur coders, there’s no longer shame in admitting that you are a programmer geek. In fact, it means that you are a member of an exclusive club of brilliant logicians who are all just one killer app away from retiring rich and living large.
As a result, the image of geeks in movies, TV and pop culture has shifted away from the dorky “Revenge of the Nerds” virgins with thick glasses. Now the geeks start dot-coms, stop bad guys, save the world, make millions, and get the (real live, not virtual) girl.
This short quiz will help you see if you’ve got what it takes. The more questions you answer “yes”, the more you are programmed to be a geek.