Are you working on apps for Windows Phone 7? Make sure I (and through me, the rest of Microsoft Canada's WP7 team) know about it - drop me a line!
Movin' on Up
As a complete reboot and from-the-ground-up rethinking of Microsoft's approach to mobile, Windows Phone 7 gives you a unique opportunity to get in on the ground floor, make a splash and be a rock star. Albert Shum's new UI design makes it stand apart from other mobile OSs, and …
Reactive Extensions for JS come from open source's best friend Microsoft. The gist is this: asynchronous coding with call-backs is hard, but if you treat events (from the user, from ajax HTTP, or whatever) as a collection that you can subscribe to, and you can map and filter those collections with anonymous functions, it's easier. We'll have to see. The speaker, Erik Meijer, gave a pretty similar talk at MIX .
Badges, with Ribbons
They took some flak for …
I've been spending summer playing a couple of Xbox 360 games situated in dark nightmare worlds. One is Microsoft Studios' and Remedy's Alan Wake , which could be described as an homage to Stephen King (so much so that they name-drop him in the opening credits); the other is Limbo , an Xbox Live Arcade game:
Calling Limbo a "2-D side-scroller game" does it as much injustice as referring to Red Dead Redemption as "a cowboy …
Sadly, addressing both of these issues concurrently is a serious challenge, as I can only presume that Microsoft, et. al., paid handsomely for the opportunity to present themselves. Other events manage to keep costs down, however, so I assume there's some room for cost savings that wouldn't require moving the event to a spare O'Reilly warehouse and catering it entirely with Folger's coffee and stale PB&J sandwiches.
Personally, I find I have more fun (and often learn …
…Android has a ways to come in that respect, and neither HP/ Palm, Microsoft, or RIM appear to be anywhere near a realistic app/media store solution.
In the near-term, I expect to shift over to the Nexus One as my default mobile handset, if only because it's the newest and fastest hardware available to me. I also still believe strongly in the potential of WebOS, but only if HP gets off their respective asses and delivers some hardware that can deliver on the system's potential. …
…with mono winforms so we'll turn that off. $ mono fsharp/bin/fsi.exe --gui- Microsoft (R) F# 2.0 Interactive build 2.0.0.0 Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
For help type # help;;
> printf "hi\n";; hi val it : unit = () > #q;;
- Exit...
Joe says that they are working on getting DMGs up for Mac users ASAP . (within days)
…'certification' is a word that implies a significant amount of vendor influence. " Microsoft Certified Software Engineer", " Sun Certified Java Developer", " Certified Scrum Master"... in each of those cases, the certification process is as much about representing vendor interests as it is proving anything to anybody. In the case of a yearly fee, these certifications become more of a checklist to make sure you are 'in the club', as …
Also, Ruby has never had a large corporation to champion it. No Sun, Microsoft, or Apple to bankroll events. So the build it quickly, think small mindset that attracts many to Ruby is carried over to its community's conferences. To be fair to Java developers, a group of them did create the No Fluff, Just Stuff series of smaller, regional conferences as a direct response to the trade show nature of the big Java shows. But even those events are driven by central planning, …
So Microsoft has been churning out lots of really crap stuff recently—as well as really good stuff like the ongoing work on IE9. But this post is about the crap stuff. A prime example is " Songsmith", software that helps you create the most banal music based on how you're singing.
We're going to place Songsmith within the context of a big joke. First:
The Wind-Up
<object height="301" width="500"><param></param><param></param><param></param>< …
…"startup" projects seem, at least to my eye, to have a success rate only marginally higher than Microsoft's (perhaps with Android - an acqusition - as a major exception). Certainly a large proportion of them end in failure.
The new breed of company currently finds itself satisfied with private capital, and has no need for an IPO. I think Zynga and other games companies may be the earliest exemplars for us to look at. Game companies naturally lend themselves to a "studio" …