The Insider News

Michael Feathers[^]:

One of my pet peeves in programming is null checks. Many codebases are littered with them and, as a result they are often very hard to understand. It's easy enough to complain about null checks, but it's harder to root out all of the places they occur and find alternatives. The typical advice is to move your code toward using the null object pattern or to just check for null immediately and make sure that you don't pass nulls along in your program. After all, we do often need to retrieve objects and sometimes they aren't there. Let's re-examine that.

Scott Chamberlin[^]:

Recently I was interviewing candidates for some positions we had open. When I look at lots of candidates back to back I like to use the same interview question so I can compare their answers against each other. Over the years there is one technical coding question I’ve been going to more often than others as its fairly easy to describe the problem and there is just enough complexity that a good candidate can code it while leaving time for probing the depth of their understanding.... This year a couple candidates... solved it with a couple lines of LINQ.

TIME.com[^]:

The news isn’t shocking. In fact, it’s sort of a shock it didn’t happen several years ago. After slightly more than thirty years in print, PCWorld magazine is ceasing publication, effective with the current issue, to focus on its website and digital editions. If I have to explain why, you haven’t been paying attention to the media business for the past decade or so. The web has been awfully hard on magazines, and no category has suffered more than computer publications.

guardian.co.uk[^]:

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.... The documents show that: Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal...

CNET News[^]:

If smartphones can have app stores, why not cars? That's the thinking of at least some of the big automakers as they work to build the foundation for curated selections of car-centric apps that can be purchased directly from the vehicle's in-dash monitor.... The industry, which is used to multiyear development cycles on each car model and a consistent annual shipment schedule, is attempting to work with a mobile device sector more accustomed to a phone or tablet launch every other month, and where the pace of innovation has been relentless.

The Register[^]:

Hewlett-Packard has agreed that there is an undocumented administrative account in its StoreVirtual products, and is promising a patch by 17 July. The issue, which seems to have existed since 2009, was brought to the attention of The Register by Technion, the blogger who earlier published an undocumented backdoor in the company's StoreOnce products.... Although data isn't accessible via the backdoor, one user with around 50 TB of StoreVirtual capacity said the account gave sufficient access to reboot nodes in a cluster, “and so cripple the cluster”.

Microsoft[^]:

Today, we are announcing a far-reaching realignment of the company that will enable us to innovate with greater speed, efficiency and capability in a fast changing world. Today’s announcement will enable us to execute even better on our strategy to deliver a family of devices and services that best empower people for the activities they value most and the enterprise extensions and services that are most valuable to business.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

Portable Class Libraries are the Happy Little Feature that Could. They've been chugging along, doing their thing, and it's getting to the point where they are going to pop. That's pop in a good way. If you're not writing .NET apps for more than one target, then you likely haven't bumped into them. However for those people who are writing .NET and want it to run on everything from Watches to Phones to Tablets to Xboxen to Desktops to the Cloud, they are enjoying what PCLs can offer.

peterlundgren.com[^]:

Git receives a lot of positive press. There are countless websites, articles, and blog posts dedicated to the adulation of Git. It’s plenty easy to find a list of reasons to use Git. It’s much harder to find a list of substantial reasons not to use Git.... Unable to find a complete list of Git’s weaknesses, I have attempted to compile a list myself.

Sealed Abstract[^]:

The real elephant in the room here is that in all these articles on this subject, rarely does anyone actually quantify how slow JS is or provide any sort of actually useful standard of comparison. (You know… slow relative to what?) To correct this, I will develop, in this article, not just one useful equivalency for JavaScript performance–but three of them.... I’m going to quantify exactly how slow it is, and compare it to a wide variety of things in your real-life programming experience so that, when you are faced with your own platform decision, you can do your own back-of-the-napkin math on whether or not JavaScript is feasible for solving your own particular problem.

Brian Harry's blog[^]:

At TechEd, in early June, I announced our agreement to acquire InRelease – a release management product built specifically for Team Foundation Server by InCycle Software.... I’m happy to say that about a week ago we closed the acquisition and InRelease is now a part of Microsoft.... We are providing a preview of our future Release Management product today. It’s basically the existing InRelease product with some minimal changes to meet some of our compliance requirements.

Smartbear[^]:

Back in 2008, MySQL was rapidly growing in popularity when Sun Microsystems bought MySQL AB for approximately a billion bucks. The following year, Oracle scooped up Sun, and MySQL was part of the deal... Flash forward to 2013: Oracle didn’t kill off its former competitor, and MySQL remains the most popular open source database. Still, MySQL’s popularity is on the decline; as it loses its luster, viable database alternatives have started to shine.

The Accidental Businessman[^]:

When I first started digging into the bowels of the Internet, I was fascinated by how many of its protocols—like HTTP and SMTP, for example—were entirely text based. At first, this struck me as a very odd thing; text is inefficient, and machines, not humans, are meant to interpret protocols. A binary setup would save bytes — bytes! — and be all-around more manageable by software. It wasn’t long, however, before I realized the true genius behind this decision.

Computerworld[^]:

Effective immediately, developers must fix vulnerabilities in their apps rated "critical" or "important" -- the top two rankings in Microsoft's four-step threat-scoring system -- within 180 days of being notified by the MSRC. The penalty for failure: Microsoft will remove the vulnerable app from the pertinent app store.... Microsoft's own Windows, Office or Azure apps are also covered by the new policy.

ZDNet[^]:

Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner shared some new hints about what's coming during what he called Microsoft's "biggest innovation year ever" during Day 3 of Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference... We already knew Microsoft had committed to launching Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, Visual Studio 2013, SQL Server 2014, System Center 2012 R2 and a host of other "Blue" wave of products during this coming fiscal year... here are a few things I thought worth calling out...

TechHive[^]:

How Bitcoins are actually created is all too often overlooked. The currency isn’t minted at will in a factory setting. Bitcoins don’t just magically appear out of thin air. Instead, they’re the products of complex software algorithms that run day and night on incredibly powerful computers. So who, exactly, has the pioneering spirit to “mine” the virtual currency, converting CPU and GPU cycles into something of real-world value? It takes time, dedication, and an extraordinary amount of water-cooled PC hardware.