Scriptionary
I wonder what kind of development is going on at Microsoft as there hasn’t been an update for the DirectX SDK since November of 2008. This is quite out-of-sync with their regular release schedule of a new SDK every 3 months.
My guess would be that with the release date of Windows 7 inching closer, the development for DirectX 11 has to be completed soon. Of course this is 100% speculation.
If anyone has a clue, let me know.
Just released, get it while it’s hot.
It doesn’t look like there are any DirectX 11 previews in there. Is it my imagination or were those supposed to be in it? Thanks Aras for the confirmation that the DirectX 11 preview are actually in there.
EDIT2: The new DirectX redistributable was released today.
I’m not known as a person who particularly likes the .NET framework but I still have to use it. The .NET Framework is basically a massive library of general purpose functions, much like the Standard Library is to C or the Standard Template Library is to C++.
But what if it all would be discontinued?
It’s not an impossibility and rather likely considering Microsoft’s track-record. The millions of applications, libraries and websites created with .NET would be useless.
I’ve been *fortunate* enough to be part of a VB6 (CGI) to ASP.NET (VB) conversion team and, trust me when I say this, you don’t want to be part of such an effort. These conversions require truckloads of time and money, and if you work for a mid-sized to large corporation, this could easily lead into the millions of dollars.
Now imagine all of your code obsolete. Everything you’ve coded since .NET 1.0. What would you do? Let’s take FoxPro as an example. Microsoft bought FoxPro in 1992 and released a couple of versions under the “Visual”-family of products. The last version was released in 2007 and a statement of Microsoft suggests that this is the last version.
No migration tools to any other language are being provided.
Another product would be J#, which will be retired in 2015. Keep in mind that J# is a fairly recent product and was only released with Visual Studio.NET.
How far will .NET go before a turning point is reached? Consider that .NET was first released publicly in 2002 and will be a decade old in less than four years. Knowing Microsoft, the end is quite possibly much nearer than you think.
Maybe this news is a bit old but Visual Studio 2010 CTP was released, you can get it at the following location:
For you who don’t know, CTP means Community Technology Preview and can almost be regarded as a public beta version.
For C/C++ developers, you can find more info on the next version of Visual C++ 2010 on the Visual C++ Team Blog. I’m glad to see that IntelliSense for VC++ is being improved since in 2008/2005 it’s a quite horrible technology. This version also has support for some C++0x functionality.
First of all, I have to mention that this colleague has been a C and ASM programmer for most of his lengthy professional career, I won’t mention his name here but let’s just call him “Joe the Programmer” in light of current braindead naming schemes.
Joe the Programmer recently started programming with the .NET framework but yesterday came to a stop. When he was asked to help out with .NET development using ASP.NET, he took some time and to his amazement couldn’t find the ASP.NET programming language in the Visual Studio “new project” dialog.
At first this made me chuckle and I brushed it off, but then I realized he was correct to assume that there should be an ASP.NET programming language. After all, there used to be an ASP programming language although it looked suspiciously much like BASIC.
After explaining that ASP.NET is not as much a language but a technology, he went on his way and continued programming.
This all made me think that maybe the name, ASP.NET, is ambiguous, vague and might be a concept difficult to grasp for guys like Joe the Programmer. I just hope that he has a concept of OOP to go along with his newly found knowledge of ASP.NET.
What: A C++ wrapper around both WINAPI (Microsoft Windows) and PThreads (POSIX threads) functionality.
Why: To abstract cross platform functionality.
Remarks: On windows, CRITICAL_SECTION objects cannot be shared cross-process. This means that the class is tied to your application or DLL process. Comments are in Doxygen/Javadoc style.
I don’t like Visual Basic, yet in many Microsoft shops, VB is still being used especially in combination with ASP.NET. The problem with Visual Basic is that it’s not very strongly typed. Conventions are often thrown out of the window and Senior VB developers often hold their seniority as experience which, is more fiction than fact.
How many more times do I have to see Functions which don’t return anything and should have been declared as Subs.
Or: Variable 'XYZ' is used before it has been assigned a value.
Or: Variable declaration without an 'As' clause; type of Object assumed.
Ugh. You’d think that people with 15 years of development experience wouldn’t dismiss this kind of stuff and just do the right thing.
Scriptionary is growing again. Several articles have been added to the Wiki and a few articles are still coming up. Notably, two articles have been recovered from the old site: Got a minute? Refactor your code and CPUs Maximum Throughput and Overhead which haven’t been altered from their original formats.
Besides the old, new things have been introduced to Scriptionary such as the Creating a Window Wrapper Class and Getting Screen Modes articles for Microsoft Windows Graphics Programmers.
Edit: Additionally, you can keep track of the pages by visiting the “All Pages” page on the wiki.
