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Bad news. Microsoft are moving to a yearly release cycle for products.
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I guess they may anticipate their revenue stream may be drying up with the "success" of Win 8 
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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I seem to remember Microsoft promising a new focus on native developers, and incremental releases with improved C++ 11 support.
Now I know that was just marketing bs.
I think it's finally time to abandon native development for Windows using MS tools. With GCC not feature complete, and CLang (which works better on Windows) hot on its heels there are better alternatives.
Now I just need a decent Windows IDE for C++ development.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Why not Visual Studio itself and hijack the build process[^]?
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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Rob Grainger wrote: I seem to remember Microsoft promising a new focus on native developers, and incremental releases with improved C++ 11 support.
Now I know that was just marketing bs.
So because Soma made one post about VS features that aren't related to language capabilities it means there won't be any of them added in VS13??? 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Actually, I was referring to the promise to ship regular updates to VS2012 as they implemented language features.
Grand total shipped = zero.
Now, we're expected to pay for those updates as part of VS2013. Even then I'd be surprised if its C++11 feature complete.
By comparison GCC is feature complete, and CLang is feature complete in beta. Both also have started tracking the
work on what will probably be C++14.
So I have to conclude that Microsoft really aren't concerned with tracking the standard anymore.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Even though Windows Server 2012 is less than a year old, Microsoft promises a stack of new features for the R2 iteration. Hyper-V, in particular, has some compelling improvements: legacy-free, UEFI-booting "generation 2" virtual machines, faster live migration, live cloning of VMs, online disk resizing, and support for live migration, backup, disk resizing, and dynamic memory for Linux guests. If there's never time for Service Pack 1, will anyone get around to upgrading?
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But...is programming really that easy? If so, why do programmers make so much money? Well, real programming is often very complex. Real programs are usually anywhere from several thousand lines of code to hundreds, even millions of lines of code. They are much more complex than teaching examples like "Hello world" programs. Secondly, real programs usually have much higher reliability and quality requirements than a class project or software that the programmer writes for his or her own personal use or fun. Learning to program is easy and exciting. Real programming is hard... but rewarding.
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Google Reader is going away in a little under a month. There was a lot of consternation early on, but I think most people have realized that Google’s unwillingness to either kill or develop Reader was sucking all the life out of RSS. Many readers gained prominence after the announcement, and most people have settled on one by now. I tried four of the top contenders, and have some thoughts on them. Or you can continue tuning in to the Daily Insider and let me worry about the RSS.
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As a programmer who wants to write decent performing code, I am very interested in understanding the architectures of CPUs and GPUs. However, unlike desktop and server CPUs, mobile CPU and GPU vendors tend to do very little architectural disclosure.... We've done quite a bit of low-level mobile CPU analysis at AnandTech in pursuit of understanding architectures where there is no publicly available documentation. In this spirit, I wrote a few synthetic tests to better understand the performance of current-gen ARM CPU cores without having to rely upon vendor supplied information. Floating point. Fuzzy accuracy... That's a joke, son.
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Have you ever wanted to use Visual Studio to manage project artifacts but wanted to have a fully custom build process? The recommend way to do this is to build a Custom Visual Studio Project System, but there is a much easier way for lightweight needs. In this post I’ll show you how to take an existing project and “replace” the build process used? For example, wouldn’t it be cool if you could develop a Chrome Extension with VS? When you do a build it would be great to generate the .zip file to for the Chrome Gallery in the output folder. Doing this is way easier than you might think. Take aim and VS and hit it right on the .targets file.
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I recently finished Martin Odersky’s Scala course and I found it very difficult to figure out how to get started. You know, that first step when you want to start coding, but you don’t know what tools are at your disposal, what IDE to use, or which unit testing framework to choose. This tutorial will be about you, the newcomer to Scala, preparing your development environment so you can get started more easily. Scala is all about functional programming in an object oriented context.
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Most experienced developers can think of a time when they worked on a team with other accomplished programmers. Yet the code quality was anywhere from “eh” to “oh god you didn’t actually ship that did you?!” Here’s how this can happen, and what to do to minimize the chances it’ll happen to you. Homer says: It was like that when I got here.
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At [Google IO] I had a chat with Paul Irish and Pavel Feldman on where the Chrome developers tools are headed, which has spurred me to write this blog post. The web development workflow has been on my mind for a while.... The past 5 years we have fundamentally changed the way we use the browser. The browser is no longer a simple document reader; instead it’s a complex application runtime that runs realtime GPU accelerated applications. But we have a problem. Our tools are still based on the assumption that we are inspecting simple documents that have formatting on top, and a few lines of JavaScript on the side. The web is no longer document-centric. Your dev tools should be more than a typewriter.
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Prior to today, when you stopped a VM on Windows Azure we kept a reserved deployment spot for it inside one of our compute clusters, and continued to bill you for the VM compute unless you explicitly deleted the deployment. Now, with today’s update, when you stop a VM we no longer charge you any compute time for it while it is stopped – yet we still preserve the deployment state and configuration. This makes it incredibly easy to stop VMs when you aren’t actively using them to avoid billing charges, and then restart them when you want to use them again. That's just part of the Azure announcement. This is getting interesting.
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On top of bringing back a Taskbar-visible Start button, Windows 8.1 will give enterprises a lot more control over the operating system's appearance. Chief among these controls is the ability to boot straight to the desktop, a feature found in prerelease versions of Windows 8 but not officially supported in the final version. Additionally, IT departments can now exact more control over the Start screen, fixing its layout and prepopulating it with tiles for corporate apps. Stay tuned for the catchily-named Windows Embedded 8.1 Industry, coming to an ATM near you.
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I suspect that most of the people reading this piece are not the types to run unsecured networks. But if you do see them in your neighborhood, try to find out who owns them, and educate whoever is running them to replace their older router equipment (particularly if they are only capable of using WEP, as opposed to the newer WPA2 standard) and to set the appropriate WLAN passwords and to use Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) with their devices when possible. Mom's printer problem? Connected to her neighbor's unsecured network.
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Quote: "I suspect that most of the people reading this piece are not the types to run unsecured networks. But if you do see them in your neighborhood, try to find out who owns them, and educate whoever is running them to replace their older router equipment (particularly if they are only capable of using WEP, as opposed to the newer WPA2 standard) and to set the appropriate WLAN passwords and to" + "NOT" + "use Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) with their devices when possible."
Here, I fixed it
WiFi Protected Setup (WPS) PIN brute force vulnerability[^]
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If anything the problem is getting harder to fix. Five years ago you'd just need to log into at most two or three laptops to add a wifi password. Now you can easily have a dozen laptops, tablets, and phones just among the household itself; that's not counting all their friends who're used to being able to log a phone onto wifi whenever they visit to avoid paying for data.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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The word “data” connotes fixed numbers inside hard grids of information, and as a result, it is easily mistaken for fact. But including bad product introductions and wars, we have many examples of bad data causing big mistakes. Big Data raises bigger issues. The term suggests assembling many facts to create greater, previously unseen truths. It suggests the certainty of math. That promise of certainty has been a hallmark of the technology industry for decades. With Big Data, however, there are even more hazards, some human and some inherent in the technology. Kate Crawford, a researcher at Microsoft Research, calls the problem “Big Data fundamentalism.”
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Developers expect, no, demand free tools and services to do their jobs. Whether it is analytic services, integrated development environments (IDEs), application programming interfaces (APIs) or software developer kits (SDKs), developers almost always refuse to pay for the tools they use to do their jobs. Many developers would rather go out of their way to build their own tools or use bug-ridden free tools than plunk down the money it would take to buy a service or subscription that could actually help them do their jobs more efficiently. That's generous. How many coders really build the apps they want instead of complaining?
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Implementing the Repository Pattern with CakePHP
I must admit, my recent articles are becoming a bit obsessed around the repository pattern. What can I say, I like it, it’s useful, and it’s not restrictive based on a language or a framework.
I’ve long professed how I dislike convoluted controllers. CakePHP’s find method almost immediately causes this when used inside a controller. More importantly, the code inside the find method is extremely unreadable. This is almost more important than a large controller function!
I really like how this is implemented.
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Today a follow-up to my 2010 article about the meaning of the is operator. Presented as a dialog, as is my wont! I've noticed that the is operator is inconsistent in C#.... What's up with that? I did not have NULL relations with that variable.
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He doesn't seem to get it.
"
The is operator is used to check whether the run-time type of an object is compatible with a given type
"
"
An is expression evaluates to true if both of the following conditions are met:
•expression is not null.
•expression can be cast to type.
"
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Gryphons Are Awesome! Gryphons Are Awesome!
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meh
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: I did not have NULL relations with that variable.
Very cute, Terrence. 
However, he's confusing the value type vs. the declaring type. The "is" operator tests the value, not the declared type. As has been noted on StackOverflow, if you want to test the declared type, use something like this:
static public Type GetDeclaredType(TSelf self)
{
return typeof(TSelf);
}
What surprises me is the number of people that have commented that appear not to have understood this crucial distinction.
Marc
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Joe Armstrong (of Erlang) while reviewing Elixir (Ruby like language that compiles to Erlang Virtual Machine) states his Three Laws of Programming Language Design. What you get right nobody mentions. What you get wrong, people bitch about. What is difficult to understand you have to explain to people over and over again. An OS may not injure data or, through inaction, allow data to come to harm.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: An OS may not injure data or, through inaction, allow data to come to harm.
Why did nobody explain this to Microsoft back in the eighties? 
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
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whaaa whaaa whaaa
crybaby
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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You should've linked to Joe's post directly; this is just too epic not to share:
Quote: If a version3 Erlang compiler is given a file that starts:
-version(5,0).
Then it should say
** auuuuugggghhhhhh **
Oh bother and blast, I am mere version 3 compiler
and cannot see into the future.
You have given me a version 5 program. This means
my time on earth has come.
You will have to kill me. You will uninstall me,
and install a version five compiler. I will be
no more. I will cease to exist.
Goodbye old friend.
I have a headache. I'm going to have a rest...
**
All compilers need to implement something like this instead of the lameness they currently use:
The selected file is a solution file, but was created by a newer version of this application and cannot be opened.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Every day, many thousands of open source contributions are made on GitHub by developers around the world. This data is publicly available through the API and—even more conveniently—on the GitHub Archive.... The one graph that is especially awesome in all sorts of surprising ways is the contributions heat map on every user's profile page.... This ends up being extremely motivating because it lets the developer see their progress in real time. With this in mind, it seemed like a good idea to provide a more complete set of global statistics summarizing the hacker personality of any GitHub user. So that's what I did. How much of an open source hacker are you? Github knows.
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On my site is a pointer to an interesting page by Jukka Korpela of Finland, called "Character histories: Notes on some ASCII code positions". It tells how various interesting characters (then new to many computer character sets of the time) came into membership in the ASCII set. Such research is difficult now, in an 8-bit byte, ASCII code, and soft-copy screen world, where typewriters, codes of different length, and computer word lengths have been pretty much forgotten. And their documentation is mostly in hardcopy libraries; not on the Web. This vignette came about because I started to wonder: If the curly braces exist in ASCII because of my efforts and examples, and/or If I had been first to put curly braces, via IBM's Stretch, into the internal character set of any computer. Bob Bemer is responsible for placing 11 different characters into ASCII. This is their story.
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In this series of posts I’ll explain why Haskell’s data types are called algebraic - without mentioning category theory or advanced math. The algebra you learned in high school starts with numbers (e.g. 1, 2, 3 …) and operators (e.g. addition and multiplication). The operators give you a way to combine numbers and make new numbers from them.... When you get a little older you are introduced to variables (e.g. x, y, z …) which can stand for numbers. Further still, and you learn about the laws that algebra obeys. Laws like 0+x=x [and] 1⋅x=x which hold for all values of x. There are other laws as well, which define properties of numbers or of operations. When mathematicans talk about algebra, they mean something more general than this. In the algebra of Haskell types, the objects are types.
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Camino, the OS X browser that famously does things "the Mac way," has been discontinued after ten years of development.... Recent Mac converts—even not-so-recent converts like me—have it easy when it comes to picking a Web browser. OS X comes preloaded with Safari, a perfectly fine modern browser, and Chrome, Firefox, and even Opera are a couple clicks away. All of the browsers are reasonably quick, well-supported, and look and act like Mac applications are supposed to look at act, but things weren't always this way; ten years ago, the Mac browser landscape was pretty bleak. You outlasted IE on the Mac, and for that we are thankful.
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We believe in one editor, the editor almighty, macros binding heaven and earth, of all functions, seen and unseen. We believe in one editor, which is emacs the only son of Richard Stallman eternally begotten from the Gnu... It is the Meta+< and the Meta+>.
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lol. 
Gryphons Are Awesome! Gryphons Are Awesome!
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Nothing exists in a vacuum, certainly not any of the products we review. The context of our subjects has a lot to do with what’s expressed in our reviews, even in the stark light of data. Scores alone are never enough, we juxtapose the latest widget to hit our bench against its most likely competition, against its predecessors, and against anything else that might make sense.... That’s no different here, but we could almost imagine foregoing the Pixel’s context and telling its tale absent its past, so disparate it seems from the Chromebooks that came before. But then we’d miss some of the most interesting bits. For developers, it's not yet a post-PC world. But is the Pixel the PC of the future?
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Continuous integration can be awesome. It can significantly improve quality on projects. But incorporating it into daily life for the entire team can be hard. It ultimately only works if everyone on a team is both aware of the state of the build, and is actively engaged in fixing it when it breaks. We built My CI to help team leads achieve both ends: generate awareness, while encouraging everyone to fix broken builds; hopefully while making things a little more fun along the way. What Is It? My CI is a service that you turn on from our desktop software to... turn a smart phone or tablet into a mini Siren of Shame. Did you break the build? Your phone will alert you (and everyone else).
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I believe screen reading software stands at a crossroads right now. At Google I/O 2013, Google showed some of the possibilities of the ChromeVox API. What they demonstrated showed some fundamental changes in the ways screen reader software interacts with Web browsers. In this post I will discuss how I see this as a fundamental shift. I’ll discuss both the risks and rewards that I see with this model. ChromeVox and a fundamental shift in the way screen reading web pages works.
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Currently I am working on the iLang LMS (Language Management System) as a web developer. This project is one of those that became stable, but was never really completed. Our customers are large educational companies, among them Kroton, which is the largest educational company in the world, and DeVry University, ranked 5th. In that scenario, the business requirements are always changing, so our project is an ever-evolving organism that never gets completed. A titan of an author who has written 35 articles and won 19 competitions on CodeProject.
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Perhaps you’ve read posts like Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names and Falsehoods programmers believe about time. Maybe you’ve also read Falsehoods programmers believe about geography. Addressing is a fertile ground for incorrect assumptions, because everyone’s used to dealing with addresses and 99% of the time they seem so simple. Below are some incorrect assumptions I’ve seen made, or made myself. Behind The Hot Water Pipes, Third Washroom Along, Victoria Station.
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I actually have three recent experiences with trying to deal with funky addresses.
For one, I went to Coachella, which is located at 81-800 Avenue 51, Indio, CA. My GPS did not allow me to enter a dash in the number.
I live on a street with three different names. To add insult to injury, the section of the street I live on has the same name as another street in my town. I have tried to place orders online, but they think I'm not in range because their system only knows about the other street by the same name. And most food delivery drivers have some sort of trouble finding me (one guy who delivered from a place less than a mile away took over an hour to deliver once).
Also, I have a private mailbox. Not a PO Box, but a PMB. This causes a bit of confusion (to be fair, the first I had heard of a PMB was when I got one). It's especially confusing, since my PMB resides at a business which also has a suite number.
Addresses can be a real PITA sometimes.
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AspDotNetDev wrote: (to be fair, the first I had heard of a PMB was when I got one)
So, one morning you got out of bed, had coffee, heard a knock on the door, and there stood a PMB claiming" Hi! I'm yours!" ?
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I was at a shop that helps you send packages. I noticed they had mailboxes and I needed one (assuming they were PO Boxes), and when I signed up the PMB concept was explained to me.
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"In a van down by the river"
"Avenue of the Americas"
"Broadway" is a contraction of "Broad Way" and I get depressed when I see "Broadway Road". I bet someone would make a "Penny Lane Street".
There are plenty of Spanish-named streets around here -- Calle Azteca , Via de Ventura , etc. When I lived in San Diego, I was on Caminito Alvarez, one company abbreviated it to Caminito Alvar, and I had to call them to change it to CMTO Alvarez.
I worked for a cab company here in Phoenix and one of the other developers insisted that he could create a UI with textboxes for:
number , direction (N, S, E, W) , name , and type (st, ave, etc.) e.g. 123 E Main St
and it took some convincing to get him to see the light. The next developer never saw the light.
A few weeks ago I called the company to order a cab and it took some doing to convince the operator that my street doesn't have a direction. 
When accepting addresses, don't try to make it fit a pattern.
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Germany has leading-zero zip codes.
West Germany had five-digit zip codes, none starting with 0. East Germany had 4 digit zip codes. Solution? Stick a zero in front of the East German ones.
Related: Falsehoods programmers beleive about names[^]
The TL;DR is: Don't decompose further then necessary. For many applications, a multiline text field is good enough for address, as is a single "name" field.
This prevents some searches, though ("all ladies with first name Rose living on Rose street", "all our customers in odd numbered houses on We-Dig-A-Canal street"), which turns the thing into a really interesting problem: since you cannot compose reliably, you have to hold redundant data, or live with substandard searches.
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In the last couple of years, I've been adding the HTML/JS/CSS skillset to my stack of required skills and my talks and courses have reflected that change. To my readers who are deep in the XAML stack, this change seems to have come at somewhat a shock to many. I've even been accused by some of abandoning the Silverlight, WPF, Win8, WinPhone folks. This has caused me a lot of frustration because I don't believe that developers can or should only know one possible stack. To reach the full breadth of users, sometimes you need to be able to develop across the ecosystems. Are your skills still relevant? How do you keep up to date?
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