This one just shot through the blogosphere: the idea that VS Express might have been bundled with Vista. Although I do not believe that VB.net is actually a "beginner's" language, that there could have been such a powerful environment broadly available is a sorely missed opportunity.

This one just shot through the blogosphere: the idea that VS Express might have been bundled with Vista. Although I do not believe that VB.net is actually a "beginner's" language, that there could have been such a powerful environment broadly available is a sorely missed opportunity.

I've abused Jeff Atwood's comments section enough, but I want to continue ranting about multicore machines.

One of the themes in his comment section is that games don't speed up on multicore machines. This is largely true. Jeff points out, correctly, that most games are video-processor bound and not CPU-bound …

My colleague Roland Racko, who runs the website voicewizard.com, warns me that I may be prematurely enthusiastic about Dragon's capabilities.  I've dictated this blog entry on my mobile device, an Axim PDA, whether the transcription works, we'll have to see. [Note: It misspelled Axim and missed "to see"]

Drools.NET is a port of the Drools library to .NET. I have a bg, big architectural decision coming up for a client and I am debating about whether to tackle the issue with an inference engine or a scripting language. So I've been looking at Drools pretty closely. It's …

Against my better judgment I bought Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 from Amazon.  Over the years I've tried lots of dictation software and have been uniformly disappointed.  The new NaturallySpeaking says that it achieves a high level of accuracy out of the box without extensive user training.  Many people say that "Gee …

I quite liked COmega's model for concurrency. Joins is a library from Microsoft that implements the same model using .NET 2.0 generics. I haven't played with it yet, but it's definitely in the queue.

I like Karsten Januszweski's 5-day tutorial on WPF (via \<a href="http://www.knowing.net/ct.ashx?id=efab0325-bace-41c3-b0bf-50441130484f&url=http%3a%2f%2ffeeds.feedburner.com%2f%7er%2fAContinuousLearnersWeblog%2f%7e3%2f10102168%2flearn-wpf-in-5-days.html"" target=_blank rel="noopener noreferrer">Steve Pietrek). Instead of writing something himself, he's structured advice on …

Everyone's buzzing about Photosynth, Microsoft's impressive technology that stitches together photographs and presents them in a 3-D space. However, all that is available today is a video.

In the meantime, though, it turns out that automatically stitching together photos to create panoramas appears to be a solved problem. \<a href …

Brilliant! The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression (http://www.hutter1.net/prize.htm) takes as its challenge the task of compressing 100MB of Wikipedia text into the pre-competition best of \~17MB. The idea is that a chunk of Wikipedia text that big has characteristics relevant to compression that go beyond …