The Insider News

MSDN Magazine[^]:

I’ve written a lot of DirectX code and I’ve written about DirectX extensively. I’ve even produced online training courses on DirectX. It really isn’t as hard as some developers make it out to be. There’s definitely a learning curve, but once you get over that, it’s not hard to understand how and why DirectX works the way it does. Still, I’ll admit that the DirectX family of APIs could be easier to use. A few nights ago, I decided to remedy this. I stayed up all night and wrote a little header file....

X8 blog[^]:

Do i need replication? Actually this question should be replaced with ‘Can I afford data loss?’. Naturally the answer is ‘Hell no! Losing the data would ruin my business!’ So could you afford to lose data from the last hour, last 15 minutes or last minute? Or maybe you need a zero data-loss solution? It's not enough to just enable replication in your database because if you want your data to be completely safe you must face a tough decision about what replication mode best fits your requirements.

aphyr.com[^]:

Network partitions are a contentious subject. Some claim that modern networks are reliable and that we are too concerned with designing for theoretical failure modes. They often accept that single-node failures are common but argue that we can reliably detect and handle them. Conversely, others subscribe to Peter Deutsch’s Fallacies of Distributed Computing and disagree. They attest that partitions do occur in their systems, and that, as James Hamilton of Amazon Web Services neatly summarizes, “network partitions should be rare but net gear continues to cause more issues than it should.” The answer to this debate radically affects the design of distributed databases, queues, and applications. So who’s right?

Brent Ozar Unlimited[^]:

Just when you thought SQL Server couldn’t get better, Microsoft is announcing the features for SQL Server 2014. They haven’t announced the licensing/pricing, but I’ll tell you what I do know so far.... There’s very real improvements in here for everybody. If you’re a DBA on a multi-terabyte database, you’re going to love the SSD buffer pool extensions and the granular index rebuilds. If you’re BI-curious, you’re going to be experimenting with the clustered column store indexes. If you’re a software-as-a-service vendor with lots of clients, you’re going to love failover cluster support for CSVs and query performance improvements. And if you’re a developer who works with a SQL Server back end, you’ve got all kinds of new tricks to scale.

Somasegar's blog[^]:

I’m thrilled to share that our next major release, Visual Studio 2013, will be available later this year, with a preview build publicly available at Build 2013 in San Francisco at the end of the month. In his keynote demo and follow-on foundational session today at TechEd, Brian Harry highlighted some of the new ALM capabilities coming in this release and in the cloud, including new features focused on business agility, quality enablement, and DevOps. Here are a few of my favorites...