CodeGuru Blog - February 2009 Archives

According to Jason Zander, General Manager of Visual Studio, the answer is "Our goal with both the current and upcoming products is to provide streamlined solutions that increase developer productivity and make developers' jobs easier." Jason Zander, MicrosoftIn Visual Studio 2008, the goal was to allow developers to do more with less, in 2010 Zander says they are continuing to push the product in this same direction. He sites simplified testing, better performance, easier testing, and other features as ways that Microsoft is accomplishing this. Some other things learned from Zander include the following: There are 14,000 customers for Visual Studio Team System 2008 deploying to over 500,000 clients. LINQ is one of the favorite features by customers. Things have been added to VS 2008 even after the initial release. Client Profile was introduced in SP1. The UI for VS 2010 is redesigned. In VS 2010, WPF was used to make improvements to the toolbars and menus. In VS 2010, there is a new text editor to allow you to do advanced graphics similar to what you can do in Microsoft Word.Zander had a lot more to say as well. You can find his direct answers in the Microsoft PressPass Q&A.

Silverlight is here to compete with Flash and Flex. I believe everyone is aware that Microsoft has set its sites on Flash and is workign to show they can take over the market. You might consider it a losing battle to go against Flash, but then when Internet Explorer started, there was already a dominating company in the browser market too. That didn't stop Microsoft then, I don't think the domination of Flash is going to stop them now.

InternetNews posted a story on Facial recognition called Facial Recognition Gets a Black Eye at Black Hat. In this article they tell how facial recognition as built-in security is busted. Bottom line, a picture of your face is as good as your face itself! If you are building biometric security into your applications, you should verify that the level of security it provides meets your needs!

I'm watching a video of the February Indianapolis .NET Developers Association meeting. In this meeting Mark Strawmyer is presenting on changes in C#  and Visual Basic coming with the next release. To be fair, the presentations were based off of PDC presentations, so the material was a bit reused. In this blog, I will reuse part of it yet again.

Fads come and go. Social networking and linking to third-party sites seems to be today's craze. We live and operate in a Web 2.0 world.