The Insider News

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...

Ars Technica[^]:

Even though Windows Server 2012 is less than a year old, Microsoft promises a stack of new features for the R2 iteration. Hyper-V, in particular, has some compelling improvements: legacy-free, UEFI-booting "generation 2" virtual machines, faster live migration, live cloning of VMs, online disk resizing, and support for live migration, backup, disk resizing, and dynamic memory for Linux guests.

math-blog.com[^]:

But...is programming really that easy? If so, why do programmers make so much money? Well, real programming is often very complex. Real programs are usually anywhere from several thousand lines of code to hundreds, even millions of lines of code. They are much more complex than teaching examples like "Hello world" programs. Secondly, real programs usually have much higher reliability and quality requirements than a class project or software that the programmer writes for his or her own personal use or fun.

Digital Scofflaw[^]:

Google Reader is going away in a little under a month. There was a lot of consternation early on, but I think most people have realized that Google’s unwillingness to either kill or develop Reader was sucking all the life out of RSS. Many readers gained prominence after the announcement, and most people have settled on one by now. I tried four of the top contenders, and have some thoughts on them.

AnandTech[^]:

As a programmer who wants to write decent performing code, I am very interested in understanding the architectures of CPUs and GPUs. However, unlike desktop and server CPUs, mobile CPU and GPU vendors tend to do very little architectural disclosure.... We've done quite a bit of low-level mobile CPU analysis at AnandTech in pursuit of understanding architectures where there is no publicly available documentation. In this spirit, I wrote a few synthetic tests to better understand the performance of current-gen ARM CPU cores without having to rely upon vendor supplied information.

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi[^]:

Have you ever wanted to use Visual Studio to manage project artifacts but wanted to have a fully custom build process? The recommend way to do this is to build a Custom Visual Studio Project System, but there is a much easier way for lightweight needs. In this post I’ll show you how to take an existing project and “replace” the build process used? For example, wouldn’t it be cool if you could develop a Chrome Extension with VS? When you do a build it would be great to generate the .zip file to for the Chrome Gallery in the output folder. Doing this is way easier than you might think.

Nettuts+[^]:

I recently finished Martin Odersky’s Scala course and I found it very difficult to figure out how to get started. You know, that first step when you want to start coding, but you don’t know what tools are at your disposal, what IDE to use, or which unit testing framework to choose. This tutorial will be about you, the newcomer to Scala, preparing your development environment so you can get started more easily.

ITworld[^]:

Most experienced developers can think of a time when they worked on a team with other accomplished programmers. Yet the code quality was anywhere from “eh” to “oh god you didn’t actually ship that did you?!” Here’s how this can happen, and what to do to minimize the chances it’ll happen to you.