Weekly Review: 27th January 2013

Welcome to the second weekly review! This week has been quite a busy week with changes to Azure and GitHub being released, along with the Firefox developer phones.

Opinion - Revisited: Where Does Microsoft Go Now?

Several months ago I wrote a post on what Microsoft should do due to the rising market share of iOS, OSX, Android and the apparent realisation from users that they are no longer reliant on Microsoft's desktop products such as Office. In the post (Where Does Microsoft Go Now?) I explained that as Microsoft's market share drops, they should invest more and more into cloud computing, specifically Azure. So what has changed in the last few months?

Weekly Review: 20th January 2013

Welcome to my first weekly review! Here you will find links to various technical articles and blogs around the web that I've come across that I think you will find interesting.

Opinion: Always "On" Application

With the recent release of Diablo 3, a lot of controversy has been around the fact that you require an always-on internet connection to play the game (including the single player). Blizzard (the makers of the game) are not the first games company (nor do I expect them to be the last) to require an always-on internet connection in order to play the games a gamer has paid for. Who benefits from such requirements - the gamer or the publishers?

Book Review: The Node Beginner Book

Starting to learn any new framework can be a daunting task, and sometimes finding the right learning resources can be hard. Luckily for Node.js there is a free beginner guide book by Manuel Kiessling. It can be found at http://www.nodebeginner.org/ with all the source code available on its GitHub's page.

NodeToDos Part 1

Welcome to the first part in a mini series in which we will convert the Backbone.js Todos Example to use a Node.js backend. If you are new to Node.js and need help installing and setting up Node.js, check out my previous post - here.

Opinion: The Future Of Coding

What is the future of coding for us developers? If we look at our industry, nothing much has changed at the root since the 70's. We are still reliant on loops, switches and constants. The syntax of languages might have changed but the underlying design is still the same. GUIs for creating programs are the same; we still drag on a control and wire up events - apart from the look of these GUIs, is there any really difference from say VB6 and Expression Blend?