I know people love Skype, but my experience using it from Hawai'i has always been terrible -- horrid echo, constant break up -- and on my recent trip to Panama, it was equally useless for calling to Hawai'i. That's all I have to say about that.

Jeff Atwood has complained about the "compilation tax" that he must pay with C#, contrasting it with Visual Basic's background compilation. It's utterly absurd that when we program, the most sophisticated, well-studied, computational task that is common, we are essentially typing into a text buffer. (At least IntelliSense / method completion …

Alan Zeichick is understandably proud that the June 1, 2007 issue of SD Times is the largest in the paper's 7-year history. Launched as the dot-com bubble was deflating, SD Times has managed to thrive and now has more articles, more readers, and more advertisers than ever. That's quite an …

John Lam reports that:

2) Miguel de Icaza spent a bunch of time lobbying us for a XamlReader.LoadFromJson() API. His reasoning was that folks don't like to type XAML, and would prefer a more wrist-friendly syntax for generating WPF/S element trees. It would be interesting to hear some …

I am writing this (although heaven knows when I'll publish) from an under-construction terminal in the Tijuana airport. My COPA flight from Panama City to LAX had to divert around the storm off Central America and, with low fuel reserves, landed in Tijuana at midnight last night.

We were then …

Perhaps I've been to above-average PDCs and below-par TechEds, but I don't think that TechEd is the PDC Without A Grand Unveiling that I dreamt of. I think that TechEd is essentially a goal-oriented show, a show where one goes to be educated about a technology with which one probably …

Michael Seuss ponders one of my favorite questions: How much of the software industry will have to deal with the concurrent computing [opportunity]? He hits the vital points:

• 2, 4, and maybe 8 cores may be usefully exploited by system services (anti-virus, disk indexing and searching, etc.), but when you …

Bill Gates has gone public on Microsoft's commercializing a multi-touch table interface called "Surface". This has been shown before, but only as one of the (many) prototypes that you see these brief glimpses of and which often are not commercialized (I think "Surface" and the device-pairing stuff was shown at …

Andrew Binstock adds to his pithy series on quality ratios (unit tests per method, unit test coverage) with a post saying that high-quality code is likely to have around 35% and perhaps even more than 45% of lines devoted to comments.

He also mentions two "commenting" practices that drive me …

"Professional Developer's Conference." "[T]he definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform." That sounds awesome, but is unfortunately paired with the clause "we try to align it to be in front of major platform milestones."

Given a major technology announcement, it's logical that the PDC to …