Author Archives: JohnHowell

Even with Quad-Cores, it appears that XP still outperforms Vista on game setups (which to us geeks, is a real developer box! 🙂 But be patient.  XP seemed a bit sluggish out of the gate, but continual tuning got it … Continue reading →

Dave Campbell has put up a site (well, it’s a over a week old now) that is a place for ‘all things Silverlight’.  You can search for examples and the blog alone is worth it.  Check it out here.

Microsoft has put together a great demonstration of a Silverlight-based search tool that was built on top of Microsoft’s Life Search engine.  The site is http://www.tafiti.com and gives you a just a hint of what you can do with Silverlight.  … Continue reading →

As Scale Developers, we’re often required to verify that our systems meet their performance requirements.  The best practice is to instrument your application using performance counters.  But sometimes you ‘inherit’ an application that is already ‘instrumented’ with calls to the … Continue reading →

Many people give Microsoft guff because they tout their own products and development.  So for those detractors of Microsoft Research, take this!  It’s not just SigGraph that is saying that Microsoft’s research into graphics is monumental, but Peter Jackon‘s firm … Continue reading →

Major League Baseball adopts Redmond’s new multimedia technology for MLB.com Web site. And this was with v1.0!  Just think the impact as the versions rev up!!!!

Continuous Integration (CI) is a process whereby as items are checked in, builds and unit tests are kicked off to ensure that if something is checked in that breaks the system (either in the build or the unit tests) you … Continue reading →

Beta 1 was very good and Beta 2 is even more stable!  There are many features in this update.  Check out Soma’s webcast to hear more!

This little tidbit came from ScottGu and although a small tidbit, it is a great new feature in the upcoming Orcas IDE.  You can now not only sort your ‘using’s but you can remove unused ‘using’s!

Intel has taken their dual-core technology and put two dual-core ICs into one CPU.  Now it’s hitting the streets!  The motherboards that support it are also just now hitting the streets so my guess is that quad-core systems will hit … Continue reading →