The Insider News

Rory Primrose[^]:

I’ve been a little late to the NuGet bandwagon. Overall I am really happy with the service that NuGet provides. It is not all smooth sailing though.... TFS get latest on a solution does not bring down NuGet package changes. I did have an idea about how to at least raise the awareness of new and updated NuGet packages in a solution to a team that uses TFS. Using the new Team Alerts feature in TFS 2012 will do the job.

Github[^]:

Sometimes R code just isn't fast enough - you've used profiling to find the bottleneck, but there's simply no way to make the code any faster.... You'll learn how to rewrite key functions in C++ to get much better performance, while not taking too much longer to write. The key to this magic is Rcpp, a fantastic tool... that makes it dead simple to connect C++ to R.

Chris Parsons[^]:

Naming things is hard. Why do we expend so much effort to get them right? Because naming programming concepts well gives us a big insight into how they fit into the system we’re designing. Continually renaming things records our insights as we go: the right names for our objects, methods and variables will yield fresh insight and in turn shape the design of the system.

geek.com[^]

Microsoft-designed Surface phone orders reportedly sent to Foxconn

Ashton Kemerling[^]:

Most programmers start off their career relatively idealistic, and often marvel at the power of little used programming languages. For me, this language was Common Lisp, which I got to work with professionally. At first I believed that Lisp still had the power to revolutionize programming, but after a few years of work I realized exactly why Lisp ended up in the position it is now: community. Every programming community has a few core beliefs, both explicit and implicit, that shape the language, the libraries, and its users. The Haskell community believes that errors should be caught by the compiler as often as possible, and Ruby believes in the principle of least astonishment. The Lisp community suffers from a belief that I call the Myth of the Lone Hacker.

Alex MacCaw[^]:

It’s incredibly exciting to see how the Web is evolving, and 2013 has a lot more in store. Over the next year, there are a number of technologies coming down the pipeline that have the potential to radically transform how we use and develop for the Web.... While many of these APIs will take some time to filter over to other browsers, the market share that WebKit wields will pressure other browser vendors to offer their own implementations.

TechNet Blogs[^]:

It’s hard to believe it’s been just over a month since Surface with Windows RT hit the market. The response from Surface customers has been fantastic and exciting to see.... Today, I want to share a bit more detail about the growing Surface family of products and Surface with Windows 8 Pro, specifically around pricing. In January, Surface with Windows 8 Pro will be available in two versions and pricing will start at...

TechHive[^]:

A group of developers hoping to turn Open webOS into an Android app recently claimed it is getting closer to achieving its goal. Phoenix International Communications, made up of volunteer hackers, recently posted a video to YouTube showing a “pre-alpha” version of webOS running on a Samsung Nexus S 4G.

ExtremeTech[^]:

Way back in August, three months before the release of Windows 8, we learnt about the existence of a project at Microsoft codenamed Blue. At the time it wasn’t clear whether this was Windows 9, or some kind of interim update/service pack for Windows 8. Now, if unnamed sources are to be believed, Windows Blue is both of those things: a major update to Windows 8, and also the beginning of a major shift that will result in a major release of Windows every 12 months — just like Apple’s OS X.