The Insider News

Davedev's Blog[^]:

I recently took the World of Warcraft Starter Kit I did for Windows, which was written in WinJS (Windows Library for JavaScript), and ported it to Windows Phone. Since there is currently no WinJS available for Windows Phone I chose to write a XAML/C# native Windows Phone app and then make my network calls using the Web Browser Control. This is the same common approach that is used in the Windows Phone HTML5 App template and other popular tools such as Intel’s XDK.

GruffCode[^]:

Everything other than the code that performs the task at hand is just overhead. We don’t need a fancy date picker control in a nicely styled page for the vast majority of our internal tools. We don’t even really need a page, for that matter. We just need a way to issue a command to the application and have it, in turn, execute the code that we’ve written to accomplish a given task. All we really need is a simple console application!

Medium[^]:

I am a junior developer. My current job title may be just “Software Developer”, but I am 18 years old (turning 19 in August), and therefore, to the software industry, I am a junior developer. So what does that really mean? ... Rather than coming up with a formal definition, I will give some examples, from which you can derive the meaning.

Rogish Reading Writing[^]:

Google has finally come clean that they figured out what many of us have been repeating for years: brain teasers in interviews don’t lead to measurably better employee outcomes. I’ve never interviewed at Google but I did interview at a company that asked me a “brain teaser” question.... These aren’t just wacky – they’re stupid. Not only do these questions bear little resemblance to anything we do in software development, it’s lazy to use brain-teasers.

High Scalability[^]:

There has been a lot of speculation and assumptions around whether PRISM exists and if it is cost effective. I don't know whether it exists or not, but I can tell you if it could be built. Short answer: It can.... Let's experiment and try to build PRISM by ourselves.

ZDNet[^]:

Good night, TechNet. The online Technet blogs and customer support forums will live on, but Microsoft announced today in a letter to subscribers that it plans to retire its venerable TechNet subscriptions service. New subscriptions will no longer be available after August 31, 2013, and the subscription service will shut down as current subscribers' contracts end.

engadget.com[^]:

When Mozilla said devices running Firefox OS would be cheap, we didn't know they'd be this cheap. Telefónica has just tweeted that the ZTE Open will be launching in Spain tomorrow for €69, which translates to around $90 and is a good $30 less than the cheapest developer unit we'd seen until now.

jitbit.com[^]:

Unlike the cool startup kids building stuff with "Socket.io on top of Node.js with MongoDB and a Rails layer", our startup is mostly Microsoft-based. To be honest, I do regret that sometimes... I wish I was a cool kid too - hacking stuff in XCode, doing Rails development... In fact, we do try all these tools for our experimental projects. But when it comes to a commercial product - after hours of discussing all the pros and cons we keep choosing Microsoft. Over and over.

searchengineland.com[^]:

You appeared on the search engine scene in December 1995. You made us go “woah” when you arrived. You did that by indexing around 20 million web pages, at a time when indexing 2 million web pages was considered to be big. Today, of course, pages get indexed in the billions, the tens of billions or more. But in 1995, 20 million was huge. Existing search engines like Lycos, Excite & InfoSeek (to name only a few) didn’t quite know what hit them. With so many pages, you seemed to find stuff they and others didn’t.

Visual C++ Team Blog[^]:

If you’ve ever profiled an optimized build of a C++ application there is a good chance that you looked at the profiling report and saw some functions missing that you expected to be present so you had to assume that they had been inlined but couldn’t be certain. Likewise, if you’ve ever tried to improve your application’s performance using the Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) feature in Visual Studio, you were likely blind to whether your training data actually had the desired effect. To help with this, in Visual Studio 2013 we’ve done work to help you understand when the compiler inlines functions and how your PGO training data has translated to the optimized binary.

Visual C++ Team Blog[^]:

Since the newer Visual C++ content is not yet live on MSDN, I copied the key bits from the "What's New for Visual C++ Developers" and replicated it below. Note that this post may be removed after the MSDN content has been available for a few weeks.

Je L'ai Dit[^]:

Facebook recently launched support for hash tags as well. So, in a way, our online life revolves around hash tags. Given that, it’s a really great thing for bash power users that # in shell means comment. I usually tend to type long commands and won’t bother remembering or saving them somewhere as it is in the bash history and i can retrieve it by reverse-i-search (Ctrl+R) anytime I want.

Fred Wu's Blog[^]:

As discussed in my book, to predict the future of a high tech industry such as computing is not particularly difficult. I believe in the foreseeable future the computing industry is still going to advance based on Moore’s law. Although, it is possible that in the next year or two quantum computers become a practical reality, in that case it will change everything!

the-pope.com[^]:

The approach of this online HTML treatise is to focus mostly on those particular elements ("tags") which are gone, or at least going away, and to track in detail the comings and goings of the various elements and attributes across the versions of HTML. A special emphasis is given here to those many versions of HTML that precede HTML 2.0, a breakdown of the many discrete versions of HTML, which is something that to my knowlege has not yet been attempted.

Hack a Day[^]:

The film explains the core concept of UNIX by demonstrating modularity with a great example by Brian Kernighan. He took a short passage from a paper he wrote and found spelling errors by piping his paper though different commands from the shell. First the words in the paper were separated line by line, made lowercase, and sorted alphabetically. All the unique words were extracted from this list, and compared to a dictionary. A spell checker in one line of code, brought to you by the power of UNIX.

matt.might.net[^]:

In honor of July's resolution, "Focus on security," I've prepared this article on the basics of using encryption. Encryption makes privacy a right that can be claimed rather than granted. Plenty of others have weighed in on the merits of encryption and its importance in modern times.... This article is a quick summary of basic encryption tools for protecting your data and your privacy. The goal is to raise awareness of these tools.