Rick LaPlante, who was largely responsible for Microsoft's strategic embrace of Application Lifecycle Management and the "super-sizing" of the IDE into VSTS, is leaving Microsoft and turning over the keys to Andrew Kass. Kass is most recently SVP of Product Development at an Atlanta company called S1 that "delivers customer …

Scott McNealy, co-founder and long-time CEO of Sun, is stepping aside in the wake of a miserable financial quarter, elevating Jonathan Schwartz to the top spot at the company. "Stepping aside" may be a euphemism for "shown the door" by a frustrated board, but my take is that, directionally, there …

With sharks, there is no theme music. Between Hollywood and The Discovery Channel, you can become familiar with sharks: their grace, their lethality, their cartilaginous skeletal systems. An actual encounter, as far as detail or knowledge goes, is largely superfluous. The sinuous way they move and the apparent lack of …

My two latest articles on Tablet PC programming are up on DevX:

The first details the development of Arcs of Fire and the Mobile PC Game SDK.

The second discusses the brand-new smart client sample application for Mobile PC development.

Microsoft is hosting the The .NET Programming Languages And Compilers Symposium in August. 10 minute lightning talks on type systems, domain-specific languages, and code generation? Oh, you know I'm going.

According to Miguel de Icaza, Mono, the cross-platform implementation of the .NET CLR, now has continuations thanks to the work of Tomi Valkeinen. The work is here. Continuations are significant to a number of programming languages that have been hard to implement on the CLR. Valkeinen's work may help a …

So, I have the opportunity to help design a game SDK. On the one hand, I can go "sprites, sounds, physics," etc. And on the other hand, I can say Ruby on Rails. Which is to say, I can look to RoR as an inspiration of a very successful framework …

In my February 15th SD Times column on the future of concurrent programming models, I wrote "[A] basic rule for thread safety is 'either write objects with no fields or write objects with no virtual method calls'...." I received an email today from someone asking about why virtual method calls …

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Instead of blogging about what's really going on in my life, I'll just say that I'm always surprised at the amount of whining I hear from computer professionals about doing taxes. Not whining about taxes, which is more than understandable, especially for the self-employed, but whining about doing taxes. Doing …