KludgeHack

Microsoft Works to become a ad-funded product
31 July 2007 in Microsoft & Software | Comments (2)

So, the next Microsoft small-business/home productivity suite is going to be free and ad-funded.

I don’t personally have anything against ad-funded products, mainly because I use some Google products daily, and I’m already used to this notion. I see this as a good way to Microsoft compete with web-based apps like the ones Google offers, with the big advantage of being a desktop application which provides hundreds more features.

MSN Messenger is a long time ad-funded desktop application, and never once I had any “problem” with that.

Microsoft Works 9.0 is now going to be the first productive application of maybe several other application using advertising. Can this type of free ad-funded products be better than the customer-paid versions?

(Original source: Mary Jo Foley – ZDNet)

What do you really need to know about C# 3.0?
31 July 2007 in Microsoft & Programming | Comments (1)

With the recent release of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, the time left to update your knowledge to the new C# 3.0 is becoming thiner. This next version of the language will bring new features you simply can’t miss.

Jomo Fisher has a list of features you can’t ignore in C# 3.0:

• You Can Target Older .NET Framework Versions
• Automatic Properties
• Simpler Delegates
• Type Inference: The var Keyword
• HashSet
• Collection Initializers
• Extension Methods
• Expression Trees

He also provides a small overview on those features in his post.

If want, you can also find the document with the complete C# 3.0 Language Specification on MSDN. There’s also a MSDN video with the language enhancements in action.

Whatever Happened to Civility on The Internet?
30 July 2007 in Personal Experience | Comments (0)

Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror, one of my favorite blogs, posted a great article about the civility on the Internet.

It starts by pointing a very common commentary in another blog, just to point out the growing nerd rage we find (particularly) online. Personally I think such attacks are a completely waste of time and a result of the extensive use of anonymity we can only find online.

The article is very good and certainly the discussion generated on comments can be even better.

It reminds me of an older post called “Don’t Ask Us Questions. We’ll Just Ignore you.” that pointed out how difficult it is to get help from people who actually know about software or hardware, but most of the times they just ignore us.

I think this xkcd.com webcomic just makes shows my point:

The 5 seconds Titanic version
30 July 2007 in Fun | Comments (1)

If you wanna see more, check this user profile.

Microsoft and Open Source
29 July 2007 in Microsoft | Comments (0)

Miguel de Icaza, the Mono team leader, has posted a great piece on the last news from Microsoft.

Recently Microsoft announced they were submitting its shared source licenses to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and bringing together in one place all their open-source efforts, the new Microsoft ”portal” for Open-Source.

I’m not going to extend my thought on this matter, at least not now, but read this post to get the whole story. I completely agree with its opinion.