So if you use that in combination with the accelerometer, then you should know when the phone has been flipped on its face.

Although, to be honest, it's not too hard to silence my Samsung Focus either.  Just press down on the volume control.

posted by Steve Wortham

So this has a couple advantages over most unmanaged languages:

1. It's easier to write correct code.

2. In general it requires less code to pull off most tasks.

And then in a web server environment, more often than not the bottleneck is going to be in the database or data access side of things anyway.  So taking a small performance hit from using a managed language is probably not worth worrying about.  At least that performance hit is nowhere near that of something like Ruby.

posted by Steve Wortham

posted by Steve Wortham

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.

posted by Steve Wortham

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.

posted by Steve Wortham

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?

posted by Steve Wortham

posted by Steve Wortham

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.

posted by Steve Wortham

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. 

posted by Steve Wortham

posted by Steve Wortham

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

posted by Steve Wortham

posted by Steve Wortham

posted by Steve Wortham

1. Debugging for databinding
2. Immediate-mode 3D API

I've always hated dealing with databinding because it's been like fumbling in the dark.  Many times I simply refuse to use binding at all because I don't want to deal with it.  Needless to say, debugging is going to be awesome.

And then the 3D demo was truly impressive, especially if it was created in one week.  It's going to be a huge leap forward in the visual capabilities of Silverlight.

posted by Steve Wortham