After using the latest version of Visual Studio for a while, I’ve grown to both like and dislike some of its features. The first Visual Studio incarnation I used was Visual Studio 6.0 (Aspen) back in 1998. In 2001 I had my first look at Visual Studio .NET (Rainier), which was the first environment for using the “brand new .NET thing”.
Do you remember a decade-old site called 4 Guys From Rolla? I used to visit it a lot in the early days of my ASP.NET career. Around 2002, it was still fairly common to visit a site and look for information, instead of just searching for it.
Khronos released version 1.0 of the WebGL specification a few days ago at Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot died today of pancreatic cancer at the age of 85. I guess most people don’t have a clue who he is, but he used to be one of my unlikely childhood heroes.
It’s been known for a while that the new version of ASP.NET will take care of an old problem, the id mangling of server controls. In short, your carefully selected id could be rewritten into something like “ctl00_MainContent_” before rendered to the client. Since this is one of the most annoying issues for several reasons, the change is very welcome by us markup-aware developers. All three of us.
In this age of high-level computing it’s quite easy to ignore the basic building blocks. You don’t have to understand the difference between float and double as long as you know your DRY and KISS, right? Not quite. There is a ton of things that can go bump in the night if you don’t watch your step.
Euphoria is a system for simulating 3D characters with muscles and skeleton, instead of using predetermined keyframes or motion capture. They have a beautiful demonstration video of the system in action. This is probably the coolest thing I’ve seen in this field since a video in the mid-nineties where interacting AI objects were visualized as flatshaded polygons.
I’ve used Visual Studio in its various incarnations since 1998 and despite all short-comings I still think it’s one of the most powerful IDEs out there. There are many people who are introduced to Visual Studio today, so here are some small beginner’s tips I want to share to new ASP.NET developers.
Almost a year ago I noticed that two of my favorite coding bloggers, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, were founding a company together amusingly called Stack Overflow. Their aim was to create a site with useful information for fellow coders, generated by user content.
JavaScript has gone from hottie to dinosaur to hottie again. The revival of latter days is mostly due to the Ajax technique, but another important factor is the emergence of competent, lightweight framework libraries. One of the most popular is jQuery and even my brilliant colleagues seems to think well of it, so if you’ve lived in a cave for a few years it’s time to face the sunshine.