Todd Anglin's Code Campground

Consider this a public service announcement for those of you that may not be receiving (or paying attention to) the details about the upcoming changes to Microsoft’s Azure pricing. Up to now, Microsoft’s Azure cloud hosting has been a “CTP” preview and as such it has also been free. Come PDC and November 17th, though, your continued usage of Azure as a free playground for cloud development will nearing its end.

With the recent acquisition of my new Mac Pro, I knew it was time to face the music and clean-up years of accumulated digital files. I have procrastinated the task for years, and now I fear further delay could lead to tragedy, with old, loud hard drives just daring me to let them guard my data until their platters spin no more. It is time to stare my digital pack rat behavior in the face and do some house cleaning.

By now, everyone should know that Silverlight 3 is official. Born on July 10th at a big launch event in San Francisco, Silverlight 3 completes the 9 month cycle of improvement that kicked-off immediately after the official release of Silverlight 2 in October of 2008.

As you may have heard by now, Microsoft has just unveiled the official pricing for its forthcoming Azure cloud computing platform. Ever since its introduction at PDC08, Microsoft has been very coy about the pricing for Azure. They’ve always defaulted to the party line that Azure pricing will be “competitive” with other cloud offerings.

Here’s the problem:

With Windows 7 officially in beta and millions of people apparently clamoring to try it, I expect many people will be playing the “does it/doesn’t it” work game with their favorite software and the new beta OS. I recently made the jump to start running Win7 full-time and have already installed a number of applications with varying degrees of success. To help others traveling along this path, I plan to log my experiences here for my app compatibility experiences with Win7 Beta.

As pretty much the entire developer world knows by now, Google recently made a splash by introducing their own "home grown" browser called Google Chrome. The browser was introduced as "the browser that does everything right because it doesn't have legacy baggage," and it has largely lived up to its billing. The browser is fast. It's easy on the memory footprint. And it's definitely got Google's minimalist signature all over it.

For anyone having trouble understanding this post's title, it's old analogy syntax: XAML is to Developers as Modern CG is to Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Still not making sense? Let me provide some more explanation.