Jan 11
“People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn’t they? People feared coal, they feared gas-powered engines. There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters.”
As Bill Gates once warned, computers have indeed become our silicon masters, pervading nearly every aspect of our modern lives. As a result, some of the greatest minds of our time have pondered the significance of computers and software on the human condition. Following are 101 great quotes about computers, with an emphasis on programming, since after all this is a software development site.
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Tags: Bill-Gates, Computer Programming, Quotes
Oct 04
Great empires often fall from within.
The death knell for Visual Basic is premature, but it’s true that VB has deviated from its original vision as an “Application Construction Kit” for the masses and has lost significant market share as a result.
Tim Anderson summed it up best:
It sounds like perfection. Microsoft had perhaps the largest number of developers in the world hooked on a language which in turn was hooked to Windows. Yet Microsoft took this asset of incalculable value and apparently tossed it aside. Back in 2002, Microsoft announced that the language was to be replaced by something new, different and incompatible. That caused rumblings that continue today. Developers expressed emotions ranging from frustration to anger. They felt betrayed.
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Tags: .NET, Alan-Cooper, Bill-Gates, C#, Development, Languages, Microsoft-.NET, Popfly, Silverlight, Software, VB, VB.NET, VB6, Visual Basic, Visual-Basic-.NET, Visual-Basic-6
Jul 20
I was having lunch recently with a colleague when he asked, “Are you still messing around with that .NET stuff?” I could tell by the tone of his voice that he—like many computer users—still viewed .NET with suspicion.
And perhaps with good reason. Purposefully kept separate from the Windows operating system, the 22MB Microsoft .NET Framework is an hour download on dialup and four minutes on broadband. For .NET developers, this extra step adds one more hurdle for a potential customer to overcome when purchasing our software.
So in this article I attempt to demystify .NET, encourage you to download the latest version of the .NET Framework so you can run the latest and greatest .NET software, and help convince Microsoft that it needs to ensure every PC user has the newest .NET.
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Tags: .NET, Bill-Gates, CLS, Common-Language-Specification, FCL, Framework-Class-Library, Microsoft, Microsoft-.NET, Visual Studio, Visual-Studio-.NET, Windows
