Cool piece by Andrew Troelsen on the new refactoring features in Visual Studio 2005 for C#. Now I just have to train myself to think to use the refactoring operations instead of letting my fingers do it as they've been forced to for lo these many years...
JohnMont (who oughta know) provided these numbers today as “quotable and public” so I thought I would:
There are ~6M professional developers worldwide, about 90% of whom target Windows
There are about 2.5M .NET developers
>60 of the Fortune 100 develop using .NET
Forrester says that 56% of enterprises in North America are choosing .NET for their development requirements vs. 44% choosing J2EE
According the legend (JohnMont didn’t comment on this part), 4-5M of those 6M developers targeting Windows are Visual Basic developers, which means that if they ever get tired of being made fun of by the C family of developers, we’re going to be trapped in phone booths while they descend on us like the birds in an Alfred Hitchcock movie…
Does anyone have a VPC image of Longhorn 4074 (the WinHEC Build) that they could share with me? Every time I try to install, it crashes the VPC. Normally, I wouldn't ask (I have a machine just for Longhorn), but I have the need to run the latest public and the latest internal builds. Thanks!
Right now, I'm holding the shared source Genghis library back. I'm acting as sole arbiter of what makes it into Genghis and how and I'm not able to keep up with the flow. I'm looking for someone who's interested in sharing this duty with me. Only proven contributors to the Windows development community need apply.
Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative is a set of 5 online courses, including Causal Reasoning (I read that 3 times before I realized this wasn't "Casual Reasoning" which I think would be very popular), Chemistry, Economics, Logic and Statistics. Unlike the MIT OpenCourseWare, apparently these courses are much more interactive and community enabled. Since the MIT courses really suffer from the lack of even a per-course mailing list, I think these features are important. Plus, I love the idea of hosting the courseware in a smart client...
Facetop has been all over the web for a couple of days and I’d like to point out two things about it:
This is exactly the kind of thing we’re enabling with the advanced client capabilities in Longhorn that you just couldn’t do in a web app. Until you see something like this, you don’t think of it, but when you’ve got advanced capability in the platform, all kinds of cool stuff happens that the creator of the platform (Apple’s Mac OS X, in this case) never considered. I fully expect the coolest Longhorn apps to come from someone outside of Microsoft.
