The Insider News

StrathWeb[^]:

On this blog, I’ve been focusing pretty much exclusively on ASP.NET Web API, but today let’s step outside .NET, and explore how you could host RESTful HTTP services directly from the native unmanaged C++ code – and I hope, this is going to be a very interesting journey, especially as C++ is so much more efficient than any managed language. If you haven’t done C++ before, or haven’t done any in years, don’t dread, modern C++ is quite different than what you might be used to.

The Geek Girl: Tara's Developer Ramblings from the Dorm[^]:

The game you will be making in this walkthrough is using the MSDN Shooter tutorial. Shooter is a particular type of game with a set of well-defined limits around what it does when the user interacts with it. This tutorial is a good starting point for learning game development with XNA and publishing a game running on Windows 8 platform using XNA leveraging MonoGame. In addition to leveraging this technology for Windows 8, you can use the MonoGame technology for native cross-platform development with other mobile platforms.

Kenny Kerr[^]:

I was quite surprised when the veil of secrecy over the Windows Phone 8 SDK was finally lifted and it was revealed that its API had in fact very little in common with the Windows 8 API. Windows 8 essentially provides two APIs for writing (Metro) apps. There’s the XAML API and then there’s Direct3D.... Great! I can write a native C++ app using Direct3D and by extension Direct2D. Direct2D is after all just a user-mode library built on top of Direct3D, but a very important one at that. It powers such notable apps as Internet Explorer on both Windows and Windows Phone. Then to my horror, I get to the bottom of this page and I see this...

.net magazine[^]:

Mark Penfold takes a look at 10 of the best new tools to see the light of day in November. There are utilities for handling menus, forms, prototyping and more. This month has a very pragmatic feel to it. Lots of problem-solving applications. If they were carpenters' tools, they'd be the interesting little ones that appear just out of reach on a silhouette of their own above and behind the craftsman's workbench.

nand2tetris.org[^]:

This site supports a course and a textbook that guide students and self-learners through the construction of a modern, full-scale computer system - hardware and software - from the ground up. In the process, the students practice many major computer science (CS) abstractions studied in typical CS courses and make them concrete through 12 guided implementation projects. The lectures, book chapters and projects are highly modular and one can pursue subsets of them in any desired order and scope. All the software tools and course materials can be downloaded freely and in open source from this site.

TechRepublic[^]:

Software that is commonly overlooked though essential is video or printer drivers (or other hardware). You may not realize that some of this software is written using PowerBASIC. There’s a good reason why this is the case. Programming languages have changed a lot since the old days when compiler makers were noted for counting CPU cycles and benchmarking them for speed. Today many programming languages produce resource hungry applications that end users often complain are slow and/or bloated. The people at PowerBASIC never lost that love of counting CPU cycles and benchmarking their compilers and are experts with Intel/AMD CPU machine language. This mindset, plus a reputation for rock solid compilers, has produced a current generation of compilers for Windows. If you want fast, reliable software with an amazingly small footprint, PowerBASIC is worth a look.

Wrox P2P[^]:

Minification is the act of stripping out unnecessary characters from code to reduce the size, and a minifier is the tool that does it. Most often, the term is applied to JavaScript although the technique can also be used on CSS and (to some extent) HTML. For the web master, the aim of minification is, of course, to reduce file size and thus speed up transfer times for clients. Using gzip compression offers bigger reductions in file size, and it’s often claimed that this makes minification redundant — a minified, gzipped page isn’t much smaller than an unminified, gzipped page. Although there is some truth in this argument, minification is still a useful technique.

NYC Resistor[^]:

Vector displays are now mostly historical oddities — old arcade games like Asteroids or Tempest, or ancient FAA radar displays — which gives them a certain charm. Unlike modern raster displays, the electron beam in the CRT is not swept left to right and top to bottom for each row in the image. Instead the beam is steered to a point and traces the lines of the displayed image.

Ars Technica[^]:

A 20-year-old college student has rebuilt Portal, Valve's 2007 space-bending game, from the ground up, on—wait for it—a graphing calculator. In a display that puts the old calculator versions of Mario and Tetris to shame, Alex Marcolina posted to a gaming forum and reddit on Sunday about his re-engineered version of Portal. It took three years to build and cannot, due to resource constraints on TI-83/84 calculators, execute more than 16 kilobytes of code.

William Binney said:

It’s everybody. The Naris device, it takes in the entire line, so it takes in all the data.
...
So that the entire social network of everybody, of every US citizen was being compiled over time.
...
And under executive order 13526, section 1.7 – you can not classify information to just cover up a crime, which this is
...
If any of this comes into Supreme Court and they rule it unconstitutional, then the entire house of cards of the government falls.

Go DevMENTAL[^]:

Want your app on multiple platforms without rewriting all the code? Here’s a summary of some of the tools, libraries and SDKs out there to support building multi-platform apps.

A List Apart[^]:

When we pledge to embrace the adaptable nature of the web—to make our websites responsive and even future-ready—we’re typically talking about diversity of devices. But the web’s diversity also comes in the form of different languages and cultures. Translation affects users’ experiences—and our organizations’ success. It’s time we consider translation part of our jobs, too.

EEHusky[^]:

This is the first in a series of posts that will be going over various aspects of using the new Stellaris Launchpad with GCC. This post is going to be a rundown of how the various compiler flags, linker scripts, libraries and drivers work together to give us a working program for our dev board.

NCZOnline[^]:

ECMAScript 5 introduced strict mode to JavaScript. The intent is to allow developers to opt-in to a “better” version of JavaScript, where some of the most common and egregious errors are handled differently. For a while, I was skeptical, especially with only one browser (Firefox) initially supporting strict mode. Fast forward to today, every major browser supports strict mode in their latest version, including Internet Explorer 10 and Opera 12. It’s time to start using strict mode.

Data Points[^]:

During a Vermont.NET User Group presentation on single-page applications, Ward Bell, from IdeaBlade, gave us a look at an open source data access API for JavaScript that he and his team were cooking up. I was very interested. From the perspective of my experience with the Entity Framework, what I saw was comparable to using EF for client-side Web development. The API is called Breeze and at the time of this writing is in beta.

doriandargan[^]:

Lately I have been considering what a next-level computing experience looks like (an integrated hardware & software solution). I’ve been imagining the role of gestural mapping, holograms & 3d space, all of which I will likely discuss in more depth at some point. But before we get to the fancy stuff, there is one aspect of the “navigation” experience that is ripe for innovation - and that is the computer keyboard.