38 Studios founder Curt Schilling said that the style of the game would be a marriage between God of War and Oblivion

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Link

Ouch.

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Visual Studio 11 Improvements

Because I spend such a large part of my workday in front of Visual Studio, I see any improvements to the environment as great as improvements to the C# language or .NET framework itself.

VS 2010 was a big step up in my opinion from previous versions, and it looks like VS11 is gonna set the bar even higher in terms of overall "slickness". I think the fact that Cut, Copy, and Paste were still on the default toolbar for VS 2010 was just ridiculous, never mind a bunch of other icons that hardly ever got clicked on, it's definitely time for Microsoft to focus on developer tool usability, and focus they have.

<blockquote>Feedback relating to the command placement reductions has been overwhelmingly positive. Developers have shared stories with us of discovering what they perceive to be new valuable features that are in fact pre-existing features that have only now gained their attention following the reductions. For example, during usability studies with the new toolbar settings, many users have noticed the Navigate Forward and Backward buttons and have assumed that this was new functionality added to the product when in fact this capability has been in the product for a number of releases.</blockquote>

Yep, that's the difference hiding clutter can make to how people perceive your product.

Oh, and the "dark" and "light" themes for the actual environment, brilliant.

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A senior IT and banking security expert said yesterday:
"The Postbank network and security systems are shocking and in
desperate need of an overhaul. This [theft ] was always going to be a
very real possibility."

Source

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After some internal discussion we all agreed that rather than imposing a statistically meaningless measurement and hoping that the mere measurement of something meaningless would cause it to get better, what we really needed was a process of continuous improvement.

Link

The real question is, why are Joel's articles so darn good?

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If Windows Marketplace was a real market, it would be
filled with tat. From floor to ceiling, boxes of extension cords,
stolen mobile phones, car radios with the wires hanging out and bits
of glass still visible in the crevices. They should probably rebrand
it something like 'Windows Car Boot Sale' such is the quality of the
goods on sale.

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Visual Studio does its job well. Its still the best .NET IDE out there. Unfortunately there's a lot of day-to-day stuff that it just doesn't do. This is where third party tools come in.

Here are my favorites. The great thing about these tools is that they have all been around for a while, and have tons of support and documentation, so there's very little chance of them being abandoned. Best of all, they're all free.

WinMerge

WinMerge is a really easy to use Open Source Diff tool, that can be used to compare both specific files and directories (which is great for merging project branches, hence the name). It comes bundled with a few useful filters (such as "exclude source control files"), which are easily modifed for your own purposes.

Tortoise SVN

Tortoise SVN is a front-end for Subversion, the installer includes both Tortoise and SVN. Mercurial is also becoming quite popular as Distributed Version Control Systems are taking off, but most companies I know of still use SVN. There's a Tortoise GUI for Mercurial as well.

Nunit

Nunit is an open source unit testing framework for .NET. It works really well, and is quite easy to use.

Test Driven .NET

Test Driven.NET allows you to run a specific unit test within Visual Studio, and even allows you to "run with debugger" which is very useful. There's a free personal version available.

Notepad++

Visual Studio is a great IDE, but is definitely overkill for simple tasks like editing an XML configuration file. Notepad++ is very lightweight replacement but has a few important features like syntax highlighting and support for plugins. The Zen Coding plugin is absolutely essential if you're a web developer, it makes writing large amounts of HTML very quick and easy.

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Five years ago today, the PlayStation 3 arrived in America
with a Blu-ray player, user-replaceable 60GB hard drive, backwards
compatibility for both original PlayStation and PS2 games, and the
ability to boot Linux — at the time, that was all a pretty big deal at
a somewhat controversial price of $600 ($673 inflation adjusted). That
was only the beginning of an exciting ride

A LOT has happened in 5 years, some bad but mostly good, and some
amazing games. Thankfully, some things never happened at all.

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Some might say the Google home page is already minimalist. I hardly ever use half the stuff on it. "I'm feeling lucky" can be accessed via the search popup box, and a search can be done by hitting enter. The menu bar at the top of the page could be a drop down. The footer is mostly advertising for Google. Take all that away and you're left with this.

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Netflix was a Wall Street star until the jarring July 12 announcement about its prices. Its stock rose from about $50 at the beginning of 2009 to more than $300 in early July.

Since backlash to the price increase, investors have grown disillusioned. Netflix's market value has plummeted 53 percent from its high, wiping out about $8 billion in stockholder wealth. On Monday, the stock shed more than $11 to close at $143.75.

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The new ribbon UI for the explorer window is so cluttered with different-sized buttons, labels, multi-part icons, and tabs that I can barely parse it. It’s more like a hall of mirrors than a task-oriented workspace. Is this really the new, streamlined Windows?

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"You can't just start in the garage as easily any more.
The price of entry is going up and up because people are expecting so
much from these products."

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Really enjoyed this.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/08/24/steve-jobss-best-quotes/

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(I have written this as a developer, but it may also help sys admins that are trying to troubleshoot  IIS & .NET issues.)

IIS and ASP.NET go hand in hand. It's really worth your while to understand IIS and how it fits together with ASP.NET. My main reason for writing this article was that when I started developing ASP.NET applications I found it difficult to find information on IIS as a first time user, and not simply as someone that was making the switch from IIS 6 to 7 (which is what most of the documentation seems to focus on). I tried to make this article easy to understand, assuming you have an understanding about what a web server is, and what ASP.NET and the .NET framework are.

Knowing The Difference Between Integrated Mode and Classic Mode

Classic Mode: In IIS 6.0 (Windows XP, Server 2003) ASP.NET was just a bolt-on ISAPI extension (an add-on module). IIS would recieve the request, and then check the type of request, and if it was for an ASP.NET object (.aspx page, etc.) it would pass processing to the ASP.NET ISAPI extension, ASP.NET would go through the page lifecycle processing the page, and then return the processed page to IIS, which IIS would then send as a response to the browser. If the type of request was not for an ASP.NET object, IIS would simply process the request itself or hand it off to the appropriate ISAPI extension.

Integrated Mode: In IIS 7.0 and upwards (Vista, W7, Server 2008, 2008R2) ASP.NET is "integrated" into IIS. IIS itself understands how to process the ASP.NET content, and does not need to pass the request off to a handler. This is obviously much more powerful from the .NET developers perspective, as .NET now has access to the entire request lifecycle, and not just the portion assigned to it by IIS. This also means that you can make use of ASP.NET functionality, such as forms authentication, even when the content being requested is not ASP.NET content. IIS 6.0 does not support Integrated Mode. IIS 7 and 7.5 support both Classic and Integrated mode. The trick is understanding the difference, and knowing which one to use.

Application Pools

The mode is specified in the Application Pool that the application is running in. According to TechNet "an application pool is a group of one or more URLs that are served by a worker process or set of worker processes". All this really means is that an application pool is a group of websites that share some common settings and processes, and are separate from other application pools. You can stop and start one Application Pool without affecting any other Application Pools on the server.

The most commonly modified settings on an Application Pool are the .NET Framework Version, Managed Pipeline Mode, and Identity. The .NET Framework version is self-explanatory. The Managed Pipeline Mode is either "Integrated" or "Classic", and the Identity is the user account that the Application Pool runs under. As of IIS 7.5 the default is ApplicationPoolIdentity. This is a special type of user account that allows IIS to create unique identities for each of its Application Pools. It's good practice to let your application run under this account, as it allows Windows to handle all the background work. This is a very low-level account however, with restricted priviledges, so if you need more user priviledges consider selecting a different account. You could always go straight for something like LocalSystem which has full rights, however this is definitely not recommended becuase it could give a skilled attacker full access to the web server.

Configuring Pipeline Modes

IIS will by default try and detect whether an application will work in Integrated mode, or if it needs to be run in Classic mode. If you are running an ASP.NET application in Integrated mode (the default setting from IIS 7 onwards), and IIS detects something that it does not think will work, you will receive the now infamous error:

HTTP Error 500.23: An ASP.NET setting has been detected that does not apply in Integrated managed pipeline mode.

If you are seeing this error, you have a few options:

1. Change the application to work in Integrated Pipeline Mode, which is beyond the scope of this article. For information on how to modify your application/web.config to run in Integrated Mode, go to the following page and navigate to "Migration Errors": http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/381/aspnet-20-breaking-changes-on-iis-70/

The problem with modifying the application to run in Integrated Mode is obviously the fact that IIS 6.0 would no longer be supported.

2. The simplest and most common method, is to run the application outside of Integrated mode by changing its Application Pool's Managed Pipeline Mode to "Classic".
IIS > Application Pools > "App Pool Name" > Basic Settings > Managed Pipeline Mode

3. Alternatively, you could try turning off IIS's mode validation as described in this article:
http://www.iis.net/ConfigReference/system.webServer/validation

Note that the following web.config snippet turns off mode validation:

<configuration>
   <system.webServer>
      <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="true" />
   </system.webServer>
</configuration>

Conclusion

Hopefully this article has been a good introduction to some of the parts that you need to know about when writing/deploying ASP.NET applications in IIS. Now that you know the basics about Pipeline Modes and Application Pools, I highly recommend reading up on them on MSDN to get more specifics..

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What's the business case for a PSP without Wi-Fi? It's still a great
media player though, I'm sure, but you lose so many of the features
that make the PSP great. I don't understand. If Sony wants a device
like this to succeed it needs lots of cheap games available on
physical hardware, something which they seemed to be moving away from
when they promised to make the entire PSP back catalog available over
PSN.

So confusing...

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If you have custom controls in your project, and you drag a control from the VS2010 toolbox onto your .aspx page, you'll see the references to the control added to the top of the page markup like so:
<%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" TagPrefix="ajax" %> <%@ Register assembly="DevExpress.Web.ASPxGridView.v10.2, Version=10.2.8.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b88d1754d700e49a" namespace="DevExpress.Web.ASPxGridView" tagprefix="dx" %> <%@ Register assembly="DevExpress.Web.ASPxEditors.v10.2, Version=10.2.8.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b88d1754d700e49a" namespace="DevExpress.Web.ASPxEditors" tagprefix="dx" %>
Now, this isn't a problem if you only have it on a couple of pages and two or three assemblies, but why not register the controls in the web.config to remove all the "fluff" at the beginning of these pages?
<add namespace="DevExpress.Web.ASPxGridView" tagPrefix="dx" assembly="DevExpress.Web.ASPxGridView.v10.2, Version=10.2.8.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b88d1754d700e49a" /%> <add namespace="DevExpress.Web.ASPxEditors" tagPrefix="dx" assembly="DevExpress.Web.ASPxEditors.v10.2, Version=10.2.8.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b88d1754d700e49a" /%> <add namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" tagPrefix="ajax" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" /%> <add namespace="AjaxControlToolkit.HTMLEditor" tagPrefix="ajax" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" /%>

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I decided to try something new, so I got the Gigabyte.

Specs:
Processor: 2.4Ghz Core i5
RAM: 4GB
HDD: 500GB
Screen: 15.6" LED (1366*768)
Graphics: NVIDIA GT 335M 1GB (nothing special, but better than Intel
integrated graphics)

Pros

The keyboard is great, and a pleasure to type on. The keyboard also
has a full numeric keypad, something the HP didn't have. The actual
build is good, and feels quite solid. It seems like the kind of laptop
you can lug around with you day after day without anything slipping
out of place.

Gigabyte really need to learn the value of good product shots. It's
quite a good looking notebook, but you wouldn't think so from the
pictures on the web. The top of the lid has an almost "wood-grain"
finish, that looks really nice. The base also looks really neat and
orderly, with all the notification lights grouped in the bottom left
hand corner, and the keyboard area looks nice. The LED screen is also
quite nice, with a balanced back-light and decent brightness, it's
what you would expect from an LED.

Cons

I really expected more from the track-pad. The gestures can be hit and
miss, and things such as 2 finger scrolling are just too fast to be
useable, with no option to set the scroll or zoom speed, you're out of
luck. That said, in my opinion all track-pads suck, this one just
sucks a little more. Considering I use a Logitech mouse 95% of the
time anyway, its not a problem.

Considering that a sub par (but not awful) track-pad is the only con,
it really is a good laptop.

Verict

Everything else, is quite impressive. Performance wise it really holds
up, I haven't done anything too strenuous, but it runs Company of
Heroes at full detail without any lag. Watching videos is also great,
the screen and laptop speakers hold out well. It's comfortable to type
on, and overall a pleasure to use. It also has e-sata, HDMI, and VGA
ports, which are sure to come in handy.

I'm really happy with my purchase, considering this is going to my
main workhorse for study & programming at home, I'm quite happy with
my decision. Gigabyte is a great brand, I think they need to work on
their marketing though, and overall presentation of what is actually a
really solid product.

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We also use SCRUM extensively. In my opinion...it's for people who want other people to think they do project management.. but in reality they just want to get the job done fast, properly and not waste the Project Manager's time.

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