The Insider News

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.

Threatpost[^]:

Bug bounty programs can be as much as 100 times more cost-effective for finding security vulnerabilities than hiring full-time security researchers to do the same thing. New research from the University of California at Berkeley, which focused on bug bounty programs run by Google and Mozilla, found that each of these programs has cost the vendor about $400,000 over the course of three years, far less than it would’ve cost to hire employees to find the same number of vulnerabilities.

jeffhandley.com[^]:

It’s about time, right‽ In fact, it has been 3 and a half years since I first declared that getting RIA Services open-sourced was my stretch goal. Since then, I’ve seen dozens of forum posts, hundreds of tweets, and over 13,000 page-views for my original declaration. There was even a time during a LIDNUG call when Scott Guthrie was directly asked what it was going to take to get RIA Services open-sourced. This has been an important topic to a lot of people for a long time, and I am finally happy to announce it’s happening!

BERG[^]:

I drew a parallel between the Apple Newton’s sophisticated, complicated hand-writing recognition and the Palm Pilot’s approach of getting humans to learn a new way to write, i.e. Graffiti. The connection I was trying to make was that there is a deliberate design approach that makes use of the plasticity and adaptability of humans to meet computers (more than) half way. Connecting this to computer vision and robotics I said something like: "What if, instead of designing computers and robots that relate to what we can see, we meet them half-way – covering our environment with markers, codes and RFIDs, making a robot-readable world".

Wired.com[^]:

Today, at Dropbox’s first-ever developers conference, the company is officially launching a new set of coding tools designed to push Dropbox into every corner of your digital life. Not content to stay sequestered inside the box, the company’s co-founders are unveiling ways for developers to meld their service with every app on every device you own.

Learning by Shipping[^]:

Targeting multiple operating systems has been an industry goal or non-goal depending on your perspective since some of the earliest days of computing. For both app developers and platform builders, the evolution of their work follow typical patterns—patterns where their goals might be aligned or manageable in the short term but become increasingly divergent over time. While history does not always repeat itself, the ingredients for a repeat of cross-platform woes currently exist in the domain of mobile apps.

Paulo Ortins[^]:

Two years ago, I was working in a project where our goal was to write a web excel-like application to calculate products/services prices... This project became so big and we didn’t use any types of automated tests (our QA team was doing manual tests) that the project spent more time being tested than being developed. Each little change, the project spent hours, hours and hours with the QA team. One day I went to a developer meeting and talked about my problem with others programmers. They suggested to me learn about unit tests, acceptance tests and TDD.

The Goo Software Blog[^]:

ASCII is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It uses 7-bit numbers to represent the letters, numerals and common punctuation used in American English. The fact that ASCII uses 7-bit numbers means there are 2-to-the-power-7 or 128 possible values it can represent, from 0 to 127 inclusive. Each of those 128 values is assigned to a character.... ASCII really should have been named ASCIIWOA: the American Standard Code for Information Exchange With Other Americans.