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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. Is your code really telling you to use an if statement?
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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. Tons of new stuff to explore in Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. Happy coding!
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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. An extensive rundown of new features in the .NET Framework direct from the .NET team.
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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. Return it. Get the deposit back. Then buy yourself a new local variable.
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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. An age-old topic: what do you think comments should do?
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That depends. On production code I expect only things that aren't obvious to be documented.
Yet, stupid comments like:
i++;
Are excelent comments if your purpose is to create a real beginner's tutorial.
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I always comments code shortly every few lines of code, typically a block of code, and always during the code writing.
The goal is to arrive to read directly the comments while you review the code for any reason.
IMHO this is the best and most useful and productive approach.
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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. Then, shalt thou count to three. No more. No less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count.
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As much as I enjoy the math articles here, this is really dumbed down for non-CPians. It's divisible by 3 because there are three equal sides. Any empty polygon of n sides and k balls per side is a multiple of n or n * (k - 1). The first comment in there nails it.
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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. That's just one of the improvements the Excel team rolled out to the web. Read on for more.
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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. Software engineering and data science offer more flexible rows, columns and functions.
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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. From Hellcat Ace to Ace Patrol, a walk through the games that made Sid great.
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Aww man now I'm going to have to go home and play some Civ.
Kevin Priddle
Editor and Special Projects Manager | Developer Media
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Clean-Code-V2.1.pdf[^]
This is one of the most complete collection of things a developer should do and things he/she should avoid.
Must read for all software developers and technical leads.
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Thanks Markus.
http://authenticcode.com
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Nice 
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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. C++ is not an easy language to write a parser for. Here's why.
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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. Building better worlds... one instruction at a time.
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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. Lights! Camera! Stylesheets!
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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. Begin by doping the pure silicon for your transistors...
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The Priceonomics blog is one of my favorites so when I saw that they had a programming puzzle up I decided to have some fun with it. And what’s more fun than hacking around with a quirky, esoteric programming language? I remember having fond memories of playing around with Prolog in middle school so decided to dig it up again in an attempt to solve this puzzle. Define a set of equations and tell Prolog to “solve for X”.
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Windows 8.1 Preview builds on the bold vision and solid foundation of Windows 8, evolving the platform to enable the next wave of app innovation. We listened to our customers and carefully evaluated telemetry data to make hardware, devices, and the user experience better. In Windows 8.1 Preview, apps continue to take center stage, introducing new ways to interact with the system and more opportunities for customers to immerse themselves in your content. Consumers and business users can experience Windows in ways that are familiar and comfortable, yet new and exciting. Forget the Start menu. Here's what's new behind the scenes.
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To be honest, 3-D printing technology just isn’t there yet for consumers. It’s expensive. It’s relatively lousy. And it takes a slew of skills--from technical to artistic--to produce anything worth printing in the first place. So specialists, like designers and engineers, can enjoy its rapid fabrication, and everyone else is left behind. Today, Microsoft announced a crucial step to empower the next wave of 3-D printer adoption. Windows 8.1 will be the first OS to support 3-D printing natively on desktops and tablets.
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Late last month, Microsoft announced a raft of interface changes that Windows 8.1 would introduce. We've been giving them a spin. As you might guess from the name, Windows 8.1 is an update to (and improvement on) Windows 8. The new user interface introduced in that operating system—the Start screen, touch-friendly "Modern" apps, the charms bar—is retained in Windows 8.1. What we see is a refinement and streamlining of these concepts. Were you right to wait for the point release?
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