February 2007 - Posts
Mary Jo Foley has a pair of new articles on experimental programming languages up on Redmond Developer News.
http://reddevnews.com/news/devnews/article.aspx?editorialsid=164
http://reddevnews.com/news/devnews/article.aspx?editorialsid=167
These discuss some of the MS research /experimental languages such as A#, F#, J#, Sing#, Spec# and X# (now known as C Omega). She spoke with me above this and quoted me in the articles.
While language innovation is good and productive, I don't think that is where the major productivity gains will be made - the significant productivity gains will be made with tools and technologies, much more so than with progamming language improvements.
Do you agree ? If you were someone, let's say Microsoft, with limited resources, would you choose to spend/invest them in naguage innovations or productivity innovations in the IDE and associated tools ? Leave a comment to share your thoughts !
Virtual PC 2007 has been released to the web and is available for free download here.
No major changes in this version - the most significant ones are
(1) Support for Vista Images
(2) Better performance (if you make sure to upgrade your VM Add-ins
2004 VMs move over fine. It will also take advantage of virtualization hardware, if your PC supports it.
Enjoy those Betas and CTPS !
Update: I found another significant new feature in VPC 2007, over on Virtual PC Guy's Weblog:
Just wanted to take some time to highlight a minor feature of Virtual PC 2007. With Virtual PC 2004 we heard a lot of feedback from users running on multi-monitor systems that wanted to be able to keep a virtual machine in fullscreen mode on one monitor while working with the host operating system on the other monitor. This was not possible with Virtual PC 2004 (whenever you took focus off the virtual machine, it would minimize) but is now possible with Virtual PC 2007. Enjoy!
Several months ago, I pointed out the great series of videos on Working with Data in ASP.NET 2.0. Well, the ASP.NET web site has outdone itself again, with a series of 23 "How To" videos on ASP.NET AJAX. Download the videos by Joe Stagner of the ASP.NET team from here.
Scott Guthrie just keeps on rolling with his great blog posts and presentations. Here is a great first look at some of the new features in Orcas (next version of Visual Studio), including screen shots and a link to a PPT of his. The next CTP, due out within a month, is going to bring together alot of features that have been floating around separately until now - including some cool features that Scott hasn't mentioned yet :-)
If your situation is anything like mine, you also find yourself without Office 2007 installed on all of your computers. Onteh other hand, alot of people, or at least all of the people that I deal with at Microsoft, are already sending around documents in the new Office 2007 file formats (i.e., .docs, .xlsx, pptx, etc). What to do ? Fortunately, the folks at Microsoft anticipated this situation and have provide an Office Compatability Pack to allow you to both read and write the 2007 file formats from within Office XP and Office 2000. I just installed it on an XP laptop and it works like a charm ! Download it from here.
Yesterday's major developer event for Microsoft developers, Microsoft Developer Academy, was a great success. Over 2,000 developers attended the event, which offered a choice of 25 different breakout sessions, plus another 6 panel discussions. I sat in on several sessions, and was very impressed (I would have attended more, but had to leave early since I was exhausted from lack of sleep and jet-lag, since I had just returned from a 2-week trip to Seattle and Neew York). The feedback on got from people I spoke to was that they also enjoyed and learned alot from the sessions.
I also led the Developer Panel Discussion, which had a good showing of panel expert and attendees. We helped them solve, or at least think about, solving, some very interesting real-world issues.
If you were at this event yesterday, I'd love to get your feedback ...
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