W3bbo

• SPLASH 2011: Andrew Black and James Noble - The Grace Programming Language Project

  Nov 12, 2011 at 2:03 PM

  The video is interesting in that it makes me wonder about what makes a language great for instruction - however, can it be said that pedagogical programming languages are like training wheels for bikes, in that they aren't strictly necessary to learn? Taking the example of "method" (as discussed in the video around 14 minutes in) - if a student is having trouble recognising what a method is, even if an alternative syntax helps them learn, will they just keep on having similar difficulties (i.e. that person just isn't cut-out for CS)?

  I would like to learn what the duo in the video think of teaching OOP through tooling (e.g. BlueJ / Object Test Bench) as opposed to using a different language.

• Windows is named Windows : But Why?

  Apr 26, 2010 at 2:03 PM

  Interesting short video, but can you redo it without the sound effects? This isn't TruTV and I don't like feeling like I'm losing 10 IQ points by simply watching a video.

• How to Use Digital Cable Tuners with CableCARD in Windows 7 Media Center

  Dec 10, 2009 at 5:01 PM

  Satellite TV doesn't seem to have similar arbitrary restrictions like Cable does, since both the US and Europe use DVB-S for Satellite TV you should be fine with whatever Hauppauge makes.

   

  BTW, what's the current status of DVB-T, DVB-T2, and MHEG support in Win7's MCE?

• Behind the Windows 7 Startup Animation

  Dec 10, 2009 at 2:43 PM

  Interesting story, I'm surprised at the process MS went through to develop this animation; I was expecting a story involving dozens of focus-group tests and things like that.

• The Notepad Bug - But Why?

  Oct 07, 2009 at 10:26 AM

  Here's another bug: why isn't there any support for \n style newlines? It's a pain to open simple text documents in WordPad. Will this be fixed in Windows 8 maybe?

• 10-4 Episode 28: An Introduction to the Historical Debugger

  Jul 23, 2009 at 5:12 AM

  Such as in a Service Pack release for VS or will it have to wait until VS2014?

• 10-4 Episode 28: An Introduction to the Historical Debugger

  Jul 22, 2009 at 11:53 AM

  The video description says it's in VSTS2010, will it be available in the other SKUs? We Professional users don't like to feel left-out

• The Mouse Project

  Apr 30, 2009 at 4:16 PM

  Interesting concepts; I'm surprised they didn't touch on the Microsoft EasyBall though.
  

• This Week on C9: Office 2010, PowerShell for OpenXML, and would you help a robot

  Apr 19, 2009 at 2:59 PM

  Problem:
  
  Web Access software isn't of much use to people who don't control their own servers. Enterprises will eat this up, but home users can't really sync Outlook Web Access with Desktop Outlook unless they use their OWA provider's Exchange servers. Similarly people who want to use Office Web Access will need to trust their provider's SharePoint servers.
  
  ....otherwise, the idea of having to upload a 40MB word document to WWA just to make a few changes and then have to redownload it again does not appeal.
  

• This Week on C9: Office 2010, PowerShell for OpenXML, and would you help a robot

  Apr 19, 2009 at 1:47 PM

  I'm of the opinion that screenshot of Excel Web Access is using Silverlight. It's a screenshot of IE7, not 8 which lacks a fair few useful CSS2 features, and the screenshot shows some things that would be very hard (if not impossible) to implement using plain XHTML/CSS/DOM Scripting, like client-side conditional formatting for bar-charts: note how the bars differ by scale rather than by scrolling (or simply being clipped). CSS2 has no support for background image scaling and making them inline images would just mess the layout up. It has to be Siverlight.
  

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