Oct 27

New .NET Logo

The .NET development team at Microsoft has created a new .NET logo (shown above).  Their goal was to create a logo “that was in sync with the key values that we want .NET to stand for: consistency, robustness and great user experiences.  The result is a design we refer to as the ‘wave.’  The design is strong, simple and distinctive.  The suggestion of the letter ‘N’ in the design will become instantly recognizable over time as shorthand for the .NET brand name.”

Oct 27

AC/DC is an interesting, anachronistic mix of classic rock and modern marketing.  The band refuses to sell its extensive music catalog on iTunes or other music services because the band members feel the album is an art form that must be preserved.  Yet the band released its new CD exclusively at Wal-Mart.  This strategy apparently hasn’t hurt the band much, as it is one of the best-selling bands of all time with over 200 million albums sold.

Now AC/DC has released a new music video as ASCII art delivered in an Excel spreadsheet.  It’s a strange but oddly compelling mix of old and new technology:

Oct 09

From xkcd: A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language.

Very funny!  But in my experience, one of the fastest ways to kill programmer productivity is to give them beer.

Oct 07

Mono is an open source implementation of the .NET framework for Linux, Windows, MacOS and other operating systems.  Mono v2.0 was just released and represents a major milestone in the Mono project.

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Oct 06

An unsubstantiated rumor posted on a CNN website caused a sharp drop in Apple’s stock price Friday.  The early morning report caused Apple shares to plummet to their lowest point in a year.  Apple denied the report as soon as they heard about it, and Apple’s stock recovered by the time CNN removed the false report, but Apple stock ended down 3 percent for the day due to the broader market slide.

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Oct 03

This is part 5 in a series of articles on obscure programming languages.

Euphoria is a powerful yet simple interpreted programming language.  “Euphoria” is an acronym for “End-User Programming with Hierarchical Objects for Robust Interpreted Applications.”

Euphoria was developed to be easier to learn and use than BASIC, but with high-level constructs.  Euphoria supports both loose and strict variable typing.  Euphoria functions are naturally generic and can operate on any type of data.  Euphoria is not object-oriented, yet it achieves many of the benefits of OO languages in a simpler way.

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Oct 02

Computerworld has published an in-depth interview with Microsoft’s leader of C# development, Anders Hejlsberg.  A prominent Danish software engineer, Hejlsberg also wrote Turbo Pascal and was lead architect of the team that developed Delphi.  Hejlsberg shared with Computerworld his thoughts on the development of C#, future programming trends, and his experiences putting out fires.  Here is a brief excerpt:

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