The Insider News

The Visual Studio Blog[^]:

By popular request, the new version of the Productivity Power Tools has arrived for Visual Studio 2012! The Productivity Power Tools are one of the top gallery extensions for Visual Studio 2010. With your feedback, some of the features made it into Visual Studio 2012 including Quick Find, Solution Explorer (nee Navigator), Quick Launch, and the new Add Reference dialog. The new edition enables the rest of the tools for Visual Studio 2012 and adds some new ones.

Ben Collins[^]:

As I sit here now, working from home at my newest job, I reflect, not with a sense of accomplishment, but with a sense of humility, knowing that there were many greater, smarter and harder working folks that traversed those same years making it all happen and enabling the opportunities that I've had. So for anyone who stumbles upon this lonely blog entry, wondering what this whole free software thing is; take a seat, pour a cup of tea, and relax for a few minutes. It's probably the last time you will have that brief illusion of a normal life, but you wont miss it one bit.

GeekWire[^]:

Doug Hebenthal, who helped create the Xbox game console and the original Zune media player, has left the company after 21 years. We’re told he’s planning to join Amazon.com.

Communications of the ACM[^]:

In the past year, many CS professors and education pundits have written about how MOOCs are scaling up CS education to hundreds of thousands of students. I'm going to take a different approach here and tell the story of how I spent nine months teaching computer programming to one student. Between July 2011 and March 2012, I taught basic programming to Brian Goler.... Brian started out with no prior programming experience, but within a few months, he was able to build SwearBuy, a free web application where people can share reviews of products that they love. More importantly, Brian gained the ability to seek out and learn more advanced technical material on his own.

The Code Project[^]:

Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews.

CSO Online[^]:

Google's new app scanner in Android 4.2 Jelly Bean moves the platform closer to Apple's model of vetting software before it is made available to mobile device users, a security expert says. Google isn't expected to copy Apple's model of controlling the distribution of all iPhone and iPad apps through a single app marketplace. However, the latest security feature acknowledges that most mobile device users want a trusted third party to determine whether an app has malicious code, or has hidden behaviors that are a privacy risk.

Pete Brown's 10rem.net[^]:

There are two ways to wipe your PC. The first, "Refresh", is good if you simply need to clean things up, but want to keep your data, music, videos, and more. The second, "Remove everything" is useful when you want to start from scratch, such as when you sell the device, or hand it over to another member of the family. (My old laptops generally end up with the kids).

Jayway[^]:

One of the big problems with long-running development projects, especially big ones, are that knowledge around certain areas tend to pile up on certain people, creating "knowledge silos". Unfortunately, this process is also self-perpetuating, as people tend to draw to working with things they know, and avoid what they don't know. Starting a code review process won't even out this landscape completely, but it will give people enough of a boost to dare venture into the code by themselves, hopefully breaking any negative spiral that may have been created. It also helps bring new members of the team into the code base quickly.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

Why do I think Rx matters? It’s a way to do asynchronous operations on event streams. Rather than hooking up click events and managing state with event handlers all over, you effectively “query” an infinite stream of events with LINQ. You can declaratively sequence events…no flags, no state machine.

UsabilityPost[^]:

So here is yet another plea for designers to stop “fixing” WebKit font smoothing by disabling subpixel rendering. Feel free to use it on light text on dark backgrounds, feel free to use it to fix custom font rendering on Windows or to style specific bits of text on the page to make it look more slender, but for main portions of text where readability is paramount please leave the default setting alone and let the operating system handle the smoothing.

Ars Technica[^]:

Using graphics to collect metrics is an old hack, going back to the "sprites" used on many early personal Web pages to track page views. Web request based tracking is also heavily used by both legitimate large-scale e-mailers and spam factories to collect information such as when and where e-mails are opened, and to test the "hit rate" for various subject lines and offer teases. But ContactMonkey gets even more personal about it, because it identifies each recipient explicitly, and reports back directly on them. It's a technique akin to those used by some "spear-phishing" attacks to inject code into e-mails—no, it doesn't execute code on the client. But it does create a way to collect information that might be useful for stalking someone.

PCWorld[^]:

They say no one can hear you scream in space, but if you so much as whisper on the Web, you can be tracked by a dozen different organizations and recorded for posterity. Simply visiting a website can allow its operators to figure out your general physical location, identify details about your device information, and install advertising cookies that can track your movements around the web. (Don't believe me? Check this out.)

Hal's (Im)Perfect Vision[^]:

Last week I overheard two of the top Microsoft “watchers” discuss the Office group having bet against Windows 8, presumably because Office 2013 is not fully a (set of) Metro (aka, Windows Store) apps. Ok, as much as it pains me to defend Office I’m going to do so. I’m going to defend them because they are more right than wrong. Especially when you take a shareholder perspective. Not only will I defend what Office did for Windows 8, I’m going to defend some of their licensing decisions. Oh that should be fun.

The Verge[^]:

Microsoft's Office for iPad, iPhone, and Android is a reality. Although Office Mobile has been rumored and reportedly spotted in the wild, Microsoft has remained persistently quiet about its plans for the product. The Verge has learned through several sources close to Microsoft's plans that the company will release Office versions for Android and iOS in early 2013.

Gizmag[^]:

As our smartphones and computers continue to become obsolete and get discarded, the environmental problem of electronic waste gets worse. Needless to say, the greater the number of electronic components that can be reclaimed and reused, the better. That’s why scientists from the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) have developed a printed circuit board that falls apart when immersed in hot water.

Windows 8 Design Handbook[^]:

The recent launch of Windows 8 brings a lot of new opportunities for both designers and developers to build beautiful apps that are fun and easy to use. This site is a collection of explanations of the most important aspects of the new Windows 8 design language.