Microsoft's GPGPU programming library: Microsoft Research Accelerator Project

Microsoft has made available a VSTS tool for teams using Scrum: Download details: Microsoft eScrum Version 1.0

Scrum is, I've concluded, The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work for software project management. It's also over-hyped, as the first line of the Wikipedia entry shows.

I'd like to talk about …

The British science weekly New Scientist is my favorite magazine (barring SD Times, of course!). The front of the magazine is devoted to brief discussions of recent findings and then there are usually several longer articles that, while generally over-credulous (string theory and many-worlds being perennially batted back and forth …

Maybe the readers of my blog are more astute (and better looking!) than average, but I was happy that several comments to my recent post on type inference were properly dismissive of what one called "the static vs. dynamic holy war." As I said when writing about the myth of …

Bill Venners, recently intrigued by Scala, talks about the \<a href="http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp%3fthread%3d209353"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">advantages of type inference in this post. Type inference means that type assignments are implicit but static (that is, the programmer need not "finger type …

Comes a time in every performance-oriented programmer's life when you can speed things up tremendously by working directly with bits. In such a situation, this page of bit twiddling hacks would be very useful: Bit Twiddling Hacks (via \<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7er/LessIsBetter/%7e3/130989829/drjflam"" target …

Nice: A plug-in for the invaluable \<a href="http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Lutz Roeder's Reflector tool that allows you to view Silverlight source:  The Electron Sculptor : View Source Reflector tool for .NET Silverlight Sites (via David Ing)

"7. Windows XP: Switching User During Capture.
Never do this. Very bad things will happen."

-- Pinnacle Studio 11 Readme.doc

Microsoft's [Surface is estimated to cost \\(10K](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface) in its first incarnation. I've already had an interesting conversation with an entrepreneur friend who has an application that he thinks would be fantastic on Surface, but \\)10K for the hardware makes it a non-starter. Although I'm …

Alan Zeichick, commenting on the release of Oracle DB 11G Beta ranks the major databases as:

1. Oracle
2. DB2
3. SQL Server
4. MySQL

I've never been a fan of DB2, but Oracle DB is a rock and I would never hesitate to recommend it. (This despite my involvement with Oracle's abysmal XML-based …