Thin Lizzy on YouTube
Software needs philosophers - "Programming languages are religions. For a long while now I've been mildly uncomfortable calling it "religion", but I don't feel bad about it anymore. They're similar enough. At the top of the language religion is the language itself; it serves as the deity and the object of worship." link
Microsoft Brings Programming to the Masses With Visual Studio Express
"At this weekend’s Maker Faire, Microsoft Corp. will display how a variety of innovative companies are using its now-free Visual Studio® 2005 Express editions to bring the power of code to the growing community of 18 million recreational and hobbyist developers. Since the launch of the Visual Studio and SQL Server™ Express editions on Nov. 7, 2005, a strong community has built up around the products and the various editions have been downloaded more than 5 million times. Much of this excitement is due in part to the diverse range of partners that have chosen to take advantage of the Visual Studio Express editions to empower a wide range of software enthusiast communities and give them the resources to customize their experiences."
A New Day for MSDN search!
Are you a developer that uses MSDN Search? Click here to try the MSDN Search.
The MSDN and TechNet search team would like to announce to you the launch of a new MSDN search based on the MSN® Search Web Service. Built on the experience gathered during our Labs deployment, the search team has spent the last three months iterating on Customer Feedback to create a framework to build great search experiences on that support Developers and in the near future IT Pros worldwide.
Our approach was to baseline search & customer data, deploy Prototypes to MSDN Labs and divert traffic from the Live Site (20K queries/day). A total of 1.5 million queries were used to log detailed usage data, solicit customer feedback, and monitor blogs and websites. During this Lab time the team went through 11 total iterations!
Customer Benefits
- Improved Performance!
- Content Relevance – Benefit from ever improving MSN Search!
- Community Searches across MSDN blogs, Forums, and CodeZone Partner Sites
- Customer Feedback opportunities through MSDN Search Blog, and MSN Search Feedback loop.
Features and Enhancements:
MSN integration - The MSN® Search Web Service enabled us to create search applications that return results from the MSN Search Engine.
Spellchecking - Users are given suggested terms for words that are commonly misspelled.
Community Content - CodeZone Communities, Forums and MSDN Blogs content searchable through tabs on the page.
OpenSearch Technology - is a set of simple formats for the sharing of search results. lt uses the simple syndication format RSS, along with a document describing the search engine and allows users to subscribe to the engine as the default search in more advanced browsers.
RSS Subscriptions - Users can subscribe to the results of a unique query and read those results the browser or other RSS reader.