Steve Wortham

• Visual Studio Toolbox: Designing XAML-based Metro style apps with Visual Studio and Blend

  Apr 25, 2012 at 3:17 PM

  I'm a Blend user myself.  I got Blend for free thanks to BizSpark.  So for anything design related I'll have Blend open in "split" view, often using the tooling of Blend and writing XAML by hand in equal measure.

  But it's good to see the improvements in tooling for VS11 when it comes to XAML.  Most of the features I saw were things that past versions of Blend could always do.  But it's really going to help those who don't have Blend.

• GoingNative 7: VC11 Auto-Vectorizer, C++ NOW, Lang.NEXT

  Mar 30, 2012 at 7:48 PM

  @jimhogg - Thanks for the response.  That makes some sense.

  So I'm sure you've thought about this.  But seeing as how C++ is used heavily in so many tools, libraries, and applications, the performance improvements you're enabling with these techniques are trickling down to power efficiency.  So you and your team are doing more to save the planet than Al Gore.  That's gotta feel good.

• GoingNative 7: VC11 Auto-Vectorizer, C++ NOW, Lang.NEXT

  Mar 29, 2012 at 2:37 PM

  So there was one thing I was thinking about during this whole interview which I don't think was addressed.  Basically, from what I've observed in the past, not all CPU instructions are created equal.  Some have a higher cost than others.

  I don't doubt that vectorizing and fitting multiple operations into a single specialized instruction is faster.  But is performing 4 addition operations (for example) in one instruction really 4 times faster than doing them one at a time?

• GoingNative 7: VC11 Auto-Vectorizer, C++ NOW, Lang.NEXT

  Mar 29, 2012 at 9:24 AM

  Very interesting talk.  I'd love to see this worked into .NET as well.  Performance for free is always welcome.

• Visual Studio Toolbox: Simplification of the Visual Studio 11 Development Environment

  Mar 15, 2012 at 7:27 PM

  I actually don't mind the monochrome look.  But some of the text areas and lists are a little too gray.  It makes them look disabled.  For example, the solution explorer and all of the debugging windows should be white since they tend to have a lot of text in them that you'll interact with.

  And I do agree about the all caps issue.  It's purely an aesthetic thing but the headers of all the windows/tabs being all caps does look funny, especially in that font.

• Energy Efficient Cloud Computing for Developers

  Feb 28, 2012 at 12:31 PM

  Cool.  I'll have to check out WASABI.

  I recently signed up with Azure for a new project of mine.  It's a software as a service model where other website owners will install a snippet on their website to gain specialized insights and uncover problems.  

  So of course its popularity is unpredictable at this point, but it has the potential to see an enormous number of requests every day and may even see drastic bursts of traffic.  So scaling has always been at the back of my mind as I'm building it.  

  Furthermore, it's absolutely true that Azure makes you think about efficiency.  Since you're essentially paying for usage, it encourages you to make your application as efficient as possible.  I'm always thinking about this as I'm writing the code, designing the database, etc.  

  I recently incorporated an optimization technique where I'm storing a temporary list of updates in-memory (I'll move this over to Azure Cache soon for better reliability).  Then I send these updates to SQL Azure and Azure Table Storage once every minute.  Due to my schema design, I'm able to greatly reduce the total number of inserts/updates that have to be performed by using this technique. 

• E3 2011: Major Nelson talks about cloud storage, beacon and games

  Jun 09, 2011 at 12:14 PM

  Agreed.  I always thought the complete profile information & saved games would be the perfect thing to store online.  Good to hear it's happening.

• A Look at the SoundLab

  May 19, 2011 at 8:07 AM

  @ZippyV:Maybe it's because they make a better sound when you drop them?

  Seriously, that's a good question.  I bet it has to do with the available software.

• A New NUI - Tobii Eyetracking Hardware

  May 12, 2011 at 2:23 PM

  I loved the asteroid game.  Anders is Superman, burning asteroids with his eyes.

• Mind Bending UX - UX Lightning Series

  Apr 17, 2011 at 7:39 AM

  The video won't play for me.  I even tried downloading in mp4 and wmv formats and I only get the first couple seconds.

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