The Insider News

CodeProject[^]:

I work on the Visa Integrated Payment (VIP) System. This is the mainframe system that processes Visa’s real-time authorization messages. It sits at the core of Visa’s processing platform and is the underlying system for all of the different card authorization platforms offered by Visa. VIP isn’t flashy or even well known to most individual cardholders, but many of them use it several times a day. Nearly all Visa transactions that take place anywhere in the world flow through this system in real time, so it is critically important that it be secure, robust, and efficient.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

I just bit the bullet and installed the Windows 8.1 Preview on my Surface RT.... I honestly didn't use my Surface RT that much, mostly just for Movies and Stuff, but this new 8.1 update adds some stuff that will have me using it around the house more. Here's 10 features that are making me look harder at Windows 8.1.

8th Light[^]:

The goal of a code retreat is to spend a full day practicing techniques you may not otherwise encounter. One of my favorite constraints to give to participants is as follows: Code Conway's Game of Life using no conditional statements - no ifs, etc. It always throws people for a loop.

Somasegar's blog[^]:

I fundamentally believe that there has never been a better time to be a software developer. In our emerging world where every company is a software company, developers have the awesome role and responsibility of driving forward all kinds of innovation across many different industries. Whether building apps for enterprises or consumers, whether harnessing the mobility and intimacy afforded by devices or the scale and economy enabled by the cloud, whether pursuing the art of development as a hobby or as a profession, and whether new to the game or a seasoned veteran, developers everywhere have the potential to build creative and compelling solutions that delight and transform the world. We at Microsoft strive to ensure developers have the tools they need to thrive while doing so.

.NET Blog[^]:

Today, we are announcing the .NET Framework 4.5.1 Preview, which includes new features and improvements across the product. We’ve made it easier to build .NET apps in Visual Studio, with convenient and useful productivity improvements that are a direct response to your feedback and requests. .NET apps are now faster, because they make better use of your hardware. We’ve also laid groundwork that will enable you to more easily take advantage of updates to the .NET Framework.

DaedTech[^]:

All of this mounting technical debt could easily be avoided by giving each loop its own count variable. Having them recycle the same one creates a compile-time dependency of what’s going on in each loop with what happened in the loop before, even though there are no other similar dependencies in evidence. In other words, recycling this local variable is the only thing that’s creating a coupling in your code–there’s no logical reason to do it.

Visual Studio Magazine[^]:

Recently I was intrigued by Joe Kunk's On VB column about commenting code. I especially liked Kunk's comment that: "It's important to communicate what the code should be doing." I thought that was the best description of what comments should do that I'd read in a very long time. I also think it's the only thing comments should do. Comments should explain the "why" of the code and stop there.

John Graham-Cumming[^]:

You might be familiar with the triangular numbers: the number of objects that form equilateral triangles.... But what about the hollow triangular numbers? The ones where you take the middle blobs out of the triangles and just leave the border. The pattern there is very simple. They are all multiples of three.

Excel Blog[^]:

Freeze Panes has been our most requested feature for quite a while, and we now support viewing workbooks that contain freeze panes. That means you can see all of those column headings at the top of your sheet all the time, as opposed to scrolling up and down as you've done in the past.

Hugo Guzman[^]:

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve been using spreadsheet software since the 80′s (props to my dad and brother for turning me ontoVisiCalc during the Apple IIe days). I’ve also been in love with the predominant spreadsheet software, Microsoft Excel, more or less since its inception.... And yet I don’t have Excel on my personal computer. Why? Because while Excel is certainly a very powerful software application with a wide range built-in functionality as well as a plethora of outstanding bells and whistles, my experiences over the past few years has suggested to me that Excel is simply incapable of handling the immense data sets that are fast becoming the norm in today’s (and tomorrow’s) enterprise business landscape.

kotaku[^]:

Before Sid Meier was Sid Meier—the iconic video game designer whose name is stamped on classic titles like Pirates! and Civilization—he was just another computer hacker.... Meier, who had graduated with a degree in computer science before there was a personal computer in every home, spent his spare time reading hacker magazines, fiddling with code on his Atari, and building his own versions of arcade games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man. At one point he made a space game and put it up on his office network; it hooked so many employees that his bosses forced him to take it down.

JetBrains .NET Tools Blog[^]:

You already know that we have been working on ReSharper 8 for quite a while, improving navigation, extending the scope of XAML support and introducing a project dependency viewer, among a plethora of other improvements. We’re setting our sights beyond the immediate 8.0 release though: for several months now, a part of the team has been working on something entirely new yet requested for a couple of years already: support for C++ in Visual Studio.

GitHub[^]:

MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a "Hello World" bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time.

Ariya Hidayat[^]:

Modern web browsers can leverage the ubiquitous graphics processing unit (GPU), both in mobile and desktop, to accelerate page rendering. This is particularly suitable for popular CSS features such as animation, transition, opacity, transformation, and many others. Web developers however need to ensure that all the bits and pieces work well to achieve the ideal 60 frames per second.

GameDev.net[^]:

Starting 3D programming is not an easy task to accomplish. There are a lot of new things that come into play, and they vary from choosing a programming language to selecting the correct 3D modeling software. These 10 goals are the things that when they are done, no matter in what language and with what rendering engine, you can consider yourself a semi-expert on this matter.