The Insider News

Betanews[^]:

Windows 8 brings a totally new user interface model with its Metro environment, which is receiving mixed response from developers and end-user customers. The tile-like UI certainly is different from the classic desktop. Does Metro mean that software will be even more creative than in previous Windows generations? Is there an inherent flaw in software design that prevents us from getting better software and will it still exist with Windows 8?

Mindscape[^]:

The big new feature in C# 5 is asynchronous programming support, which I wrote about last week. However, the C# folks have also slipped in a couple of smaller features and I thought I’d round things out by mentioning those.

MarkdownR[^]:

Markdown is getting a lot of traction in the development community. I thought it would be cool to have something like Google Docs for Markdown-based documents. We would use this as a learning experience for doing a real world project in Node.js on Windows Azure. And by the way: you're reading this article in it.

Atomic Spin[^]:

Despite occasionally feeling slower in .NET or Java than in, say, Ruby or CoffeeScript, one way to keep up the pace is with a technique we call Hate-Driven Development. I’m not talking about this kind of HDD, where you hate the code. At Atomic, HDD refers to the editor hating you. Our sense of the word refers to the horror-inducing full-saturation red highlights that appear all over the code when you use instances of unknown classes or call methods that don’t yet exist.

BBC[^]:

The internet contributes to 8.3% of the UK economy, a bigger share than for any of the other G20 major countries, a new study suggests. That made it bigger than the healthcare, construction or education sectors. The UK also carries out far more retail online than any other major economy.

Windows 8 Update[^]:

There have been 3 myths floating around the web regarding Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 8 Tablets and the demand for them in the Enterprise. There's a simple reason why these erroneous assumptions are getting so much airtime. It has a lot to do with the fact that the tech writers and bloggers who write this very rarely have worked in IT in the enterprises they write about.

Larry Osterman[^]:

Many, many months ago, Declan Eardly asked why the \ character was chosen as the path separator. The answer's from before my time, but I do remember the original reasons. It all stems from Microsoft's relationship with IBM...

Marcus Povey[^]:

The Raspberry Pi is a tiny, solid state, and ludicrously cheap hobby ARM based computer designed in the UK. It has a USB port, video, sound, an Ethernet port, 256MB RAM, and can run 3 distinct flavours of Linux. Ostensibly the device was developed with the aim of getting kids to code, and as someone who grew up with the UK hobby computing scene of the 1980s and cut their programming teeth hacking games together on the ZX Spectrum, this is something I can thoroughly get behind.

sprki.com[^]:

You've got a new (or old) computer and you want to hook up a peripheral, upgrade the RAM, or maybe just figure out what all those sockets are for. Here's your ultimate resource: A "spotter's guide" for all the RAM, all the sockets, all the connectors you're likely to find on most machines from today or yesteryear.

Webdesigner Depot[^]:

With CSS3 gradients, transitions, and all the effects, it has really seemed to have taken a lot of the weight off the shoulders of our websites, because let’s be honest—images were surely weighing them down. CSS3 and CSS can’t do everything but, ironically enough, I doubt most of us are aware of its limitations or what pushes the very edges of its possibilities. Well, today we are here to find that out.

Nettuts+[^]:

With more frameworks being bundled with an ORM, SQL is quickly becoming a lost art and is mostly relegated to the nerdiest of our clan — those pesky database people. Why not take today’s quiz and see whether you DB-chops have really gone the way of the dodo?

Pushing Pixels[^]:

Why can’t we just use vector-based icons in our application? At first glance, both designers and developers only stand to gain from switching to creating their icons in vector format. On the other hand, there’s a lot of art and a lot of craft involved in creating and maintaining a consistent visual iconography language within the specific application, and across the entire platform. Here are the issues, and some possible solutions.

TechCrunch[^]:

You’re in a car driving 100 miles per hour on a dirt road. The turns are 100-degree hairpins and there are inclines and dips that would make a normal car’s shocks fall right off their axles. Lucky for you, you’re not alone. You have a partner. Because there are two of you, you can split the responsibilities of getting to the finish line first – in one piece. This is the basis of pair programming. The deliberate practice of staffing every workstation with two software engineers focused on writing software together.