The Insider News

marketingland.com[^]:

Google Reader is turning off their feed on July 1st and by now many of you have already switched to a new RSS reader – but, for those of you who have yet to make the jump, keep reading. We wanted to give you a concise chart explaining the features, costs and functionality of some of the larger RSS feed readers on the market.

AnandTech[^]:

In the PC industry, the concept of a fabless semiconductor manufacturer isn’t unusual. NVIDIA has always been one, and now AMD is one as well. Fabless semiconductors create all of the designs for their chips, but they’re physically manufactured at a foundry partner.... ARM goes one step beyond the fabless semi: it doesn’t even sell any chips into the marketplace. ARM instead, designs IP (instruction set architecture, microprocessor, graphics, interconnects) and licenses it to anyone who wants to use it.

AllThingsD[^]:

In a quiet blog post after markets closed, Yahoo announced it will be “sunsetting” 12 of its services over the coming months, beginning as soon as today. Among the casualties is Yahoo Axis, a rather attractive and creative search browser the company debuted just one year ago. Also particularly relevant and perfectly timed: Yahoo is deep-sixing its RSS alerts, dovetailing exactly with the much bemoaned death of Google Reader on July 1.

CodeProject[^]:

I work on the Visa Integrated Payment (VIP) System. This is the mainframe system that processes Visa’s real-time authorization messages. It sits at the core of Visa’s processing platform and is the underlying system for all of the different card authorization platforms offered by Visa. VIP isn’t flashy or even well known to most individual cardholders, but many of them use it several times a day. Nearly all Visa transactions that take place anywhere in the world flow through this system in real time, so it is critically important that it be secure, robust, and efficient.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

I just bit the bullet and installed the Windows 8.1 Preview on my Surface RT.... I honestly didn't use my Surface RT that much, mostly just for Movies and Stuff, but this new 8.1 update adds some stuff that will have me using it around the house more. Here's 10 features that are making me look harder at Windows 8.1.

8th Light[^]:

The goal of a code retreat is to spend a full day practicing techniques you may not otherwise encounter. One of my favorite constraints to give to participants is as follows: Code Conway's Game of Life using no conditional statements - no ifs, etc. It always throws people for a loop.

Somasegar's blog[^]:

I fundamentally believe that there has never been a better time to be a software developer. In our emerging world where every company is a software company, developers have the awesome role and responsibility of driving forward all kinds of innovation across many different industries. Whether building apps for enterprises or consumers, whether harnessing the mobility and intimacy afforded by devices or the scale and economy enabled by the cloud, whether pursuing the art of development as a hobby or as a profession, and whether new to the game or a seasoned veteran, developers everywhere have the potential to build creative and compelling solutions that delight and transform the world. We at Microsoft strive to ensure developers have the tools they need to thrive while doing so.

.NET Blog[^]:

Today, we are announcing the .NET Framework 4.5.1 Preview, which includes new features and improvements across the product. We’ve made it easier to build .NET apps in Visual Studio, with convenient and useful productivity improvements that are a direct response to your feedback and requests. .NET apps are now faster, because they make better use of your hardware. We’ve also laid groundwork that will enable you to more easily take advantage of updates to the .NET Framework.

DaedTech[^]:

All of this mounting technical debt could easily be avoided by giving each loop its own count variable. Having them recycle the same one creates a compile-time dependency of what’s going on in each loop with what happened in the loop before, even though there are no other similar dependencies in evidence. In other words, recycling this local variable is the only thing that’s creating a coupling in your code–there’s no logical reason to do it.

Visual Studio Magazine[^]:

Recently I was intrigued by Joe Kunk's On VB column about commenting code. I especially liked Kunk's comment that: "It's important to communicate what the code should be doing." I thought that was the best description of what comments should do that I'd read in a very long time. I also think it's the only thing comments should do. Comments should explain the "why" of the code and stop there.

John Graham-Cumming[^]:

You might be familiar with the triangular numbers: the number of objects that form equilateral triangles.... But what about the hollow triangular numbers? The ones where you take the middle blobs out of the triangles and just leave the border. The pattern there is very simple. They are all multiples of three.

Excel Blog[^]:

Freeze Panes has been our most requested feature for quite a while, and we now support viewing workbooks that contain freeze panes. That means you can see all of those column headings at the top of your sheet all the time, as opposed to scrolling up and down as you've done in the past.

Hugo Guzman[^]:

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve been using spreadsheet software since the 80′s (props to my dad and brother for turning me ontoVisiCalc during the Apple IIe days). I’ve also been in love with the predominant spreadsheet software, Microsoft Excel, more or less since its inception.... And yet I don’t have Excel on my personal computer. Why? Because while Excel is certainly a very powerful software application with a wide range built-in functionality as well as a plethora of outstanding bells and whistles, my experiences over the past few years has suggested to me that Excel is simply incapable of handling the immense data sets that are fast becoming the norm in today’s (and tomorrow’s) enterprise business landscape.

kotaku[^]:

Before Sid Meier was Sid Meier—the iconic video game designer whose name is stamped on classic titles like Pirates! and Civilization—he was just another computer hacker.... Meier, who had graduated with a degree in computer science before there was a personal computer in every home, spent his spare time reading hacker magazines, fiddling with code on his Atari, and building his own versions of arcade games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man. At one point he made a space game and put it up on his office network; it hooked so many employees that his bosses forced him to take it down.