The Insider News

37signals[^]:

When developers first discover the wonders of test-driven development, it’s like gaining entrance to a new and better world with less stress and insecurity. It truly is a wonderful experience well worth celebrating. But internalizing the benefits of testing is only the first step to enlightenment. Knowing what not to test is the harder part of the lesson.

mobiForge[^]:

Facebook serves an entirely different HTML document to each device. Unlike Google, whose simple-looking home page makes it more viable to present a uniform face across different devices, Facebook's Home page looks quite different in each case. Facebook adapts both the styling and the content to ensure a reasonable experience on each device. Here's how they do it.

David Rothlisberger[^]:

It has been said that the Emacs learning curve is not so much steep as long. While the initial learning curve is indeed much steeper than other editors, that is a hump you’ll get over fairly soon. This guide does start from the basics, but its real aim is to help you reach the next level —programming the behavior of Emacs itself.

Microsoft Press[^]:

Microsoft just released SQL Server 2012 in March, and now you can learn all about it in this free ebook. The print version, should you prefer, is available from O'Reilly or your local bookseller.

Clay Shirky[^]:

The word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

There are few things sadder than the software that ships with your car's in dash computer. It's 2012 and we have hybrids that can regenerate power from inertia but the car manufacturers haven't figured out that we just want the in-dash car screen to be powered by our smartphone.

AllThingsD[^]:

Walt Mossberg tries, who writes for a living, tries using voice dictation on his phones for a week to see how well it works. For those who find typing on glass clumsy, the microphone key on Android and the new iPhone is something you might want to add to your arsenal of ways to use your phone.

Practically Efficient[^]:

It’s becoming the great 21st century social media con: They make friends with you, then take as much as they can—only they’re not getting your money; they’re taking your privacy for their own gain.

Tonava of Ideas[^]:

When the printer portion of your all-in-one printer, copier, scanner decides to retire, why throw away a perfectly good scanner. Mikko Ristila did this and ended up with a slim scanner plus a few handy parts for tinkering. Here's how he did it.

Telerik[^]:

As a programmer, I can honestly say that I am lazy. Forget the menial job of repeating tasks... if it takes me an hour to complete an iteration, I would rather spend 3 hours automating the process. You never know when you might need to do it again, and the click of a button is much more satisfying than an hour of processing data.

Ardalis[^]:

When you’re working in a strongly typed language like C# or Visual Basic, instantiating an object is done with the new keyword. It’s important that we recognize the significance of using this keyword in our code. Any time you use the new keyword, you are gluing your code to a particular implementation. You are permanently hard-coding your application to work with a particular class’s implementation. That’s huge.

fuzzy notepad[^]:

PHP is an embarrassment, a blight upon my craft. It’s so broken, but so lauded by every empowered amateur who’s yet to learn anything else, as to be maddening. It has paltry few redeeming qualities and I would prefer to forget it exists at all. But I’ve got to get this out of my system. So here goes, one last try.

SQL Server Team Blog[^]:

In-memory DBMSs have been around for some time. They were originally employed in performance sensitive applications serving telephony and financial services markets. There is a resurgence of interest around in-memory database technology and we are starting to see in-memory DBMS technology reach a disruptive tipping point for a number of scenarios. Here's why.

Phil Windley[^]:

When personal clouds begin to act as peers with other network services, people gain unprecedented power and leverage. Personal clouds can change how we relate to everything in our lives, rearrange how we buy and sell products and services, and revolutionize how we communicate with each other. For these changes to take place, personal clouds must be able to un applications for you, under your direction.

TIME[^]:

The PC industry is so young that a remarkable percentage of its most significant figures are still with us. But it lost a key one on Sunday when Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore, died at 83. Commodore was one of the first important PC companies, and Tramiel, in his own idiosyncratic manner, played a vital role in getting the PC revolution underway.

ExtremeTech[^]:

Have you ever wondered why a supercomputer is called a supercomputer? Is it the number of processors or the amount of RAM? Must a supercomputer occupy a certain amount of space, or consume a specific amount of power? Let's walk back through the history of these machines to see what made them so super.

Hack Education[^]:

One Laptop Per Child was a good idea, a noble and ambitious one at that. Originally proposed in 2006, OLPC aimed to build an inexpensive laptop that would be sold to governments in the developing world and made available in turn to the children in those countries via their respective ministries of education. Easier said than done.

Mister Goodcat[^]:

Windows Phone 8 is now starting to show up in the browser statistics of analytics services. Is Microsoft being too slow with updates for the phone? I'd say no, and here's why.

YUIBlog[^]:

As nice as it is to simplify your code and iterate over many different types of collections, the real improvement comes when you start to reuse the functions passed to the iterators. But, you ask, how can I reuse my big, complicated function? Here's how.