CodeCampOz 2008 Report

I attended an expanded CodeCampOz at CSU Wagga Wagga campus during 25-27 April 2008. There were extra sessions on the Friday afternoon this year with plenty of new .NET technologies to catch up with. What is so valuable about CodeCampOz is that the speakers are practising software development professionals from around Australia. We had a [...]

Microsoft Developer Tools - Soon to be Free to all Students

In our Faculty of Business, Technology and Sustainable Development and hence the School of IT we have a MSDN Academic Alliance licence. This gives the Faculty’s students and staff free copies of Microsoft developer tools, operating systems and servers, amongst other software.
However, Bill Gates has just announced DreamSpark which is the free availability of Microsoft [...]

Microsoft Developer Tools - Soon to be Free to all Students

In our Faculty of Business, Technology and Sustainable Development and hence the School of IT we have a MSDN Academic Alliance licence. This gives the Faculty’s students and staff free copies of Microsoft developer tools, operating systems and servers, amongst other software.
However, Bill Gates has just announced the free availability of Microsoft developer and designer [...]

Computer Science as a Postgraduate Discipline

In an article entitled ‘Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?’ Dewar and Schonberg lament:
It is our view that Computer Science (CS) education is neglecting basic skills, in particular in the areas of programming and formal methods. We consider that the general adoption of Java as a first programming language is in [...]

From Scheme to Python

Yesterday I had a brief conversation with Simon Kaplan who opened the Mix on Campus day organised by Microsoft at QUT. Amongst other things I asked how the teaching of Scheme as the introductory programming language was going. Simon informed me that they were just about to switch from Scheme to Python which I thought [...]

LINQ to have significant impact

We have been hearing about LINQ (Language INtegrated Query) for a couple of years now. With the launch of Visual Studio 2008 and C#/VB.NET 3.0 before year’s end it is now a reality. Normally LINQ is associated with databases and replacing SQL statements with compile-time checking and type safety. However LINQ can be used with [...]

Microsoft Sync Bursts on to the Scene

Wow, another major code framework announcement in a week with the release of the Microsoft Sync framework. Since the release of Google Gears which enables web apps to work offline I have wondered how Microsoft would respond. Well, in a surprise to me, we now have the Sync framework which absolutely swamps Gears. In fact [...]

The Future of IT?

This picture struck a chord with me as a likely future for information technology.
It is buried in a deep discussion on the semantic web by Alex Iskold from Read/Write Web.

JavaScript: the Assembly Language of the Web

There is further comment today by Nikhil Kotari in a blog post about the role of JavaScript in the flood tide of Web 2.0. For me, Nikhil was one of the stand-out speakers at my recent attendance at the Tech-Ed 2007 conference on the Gold Coast. For a year or more Nikhil has been developing [...]