News

Microsoft And Xamarin Collaborate To Bring Native iOS and Android To Visual Studio   Wednesday 13 November

Xamarin, best known for championing .NET when Microsoft's interests moved elsewhere, is being embraced by Microsoft as a way of bringing Android and iOS development into Visual Studio. 

Octane 2.0 Released   Wednesday 13 November

Version 2.0 of Google's benchmarking suite includes measures for reducing latency, new benchmarks that target use cases like asm.js and updates to existing benchmarks.

MariaDB 10.0 Beta Introduces Replication Enhancements   Wednesday 13 November

The new version of MariaDB, the community-developed fork of MySQL, has been released, with support for parallel slave replication threads, a feature sponsored by Google.

Google Launches App Translation Service   Tuesday 12 November

Google's App Translation Service, previewed Google I/O 2013 conference, has been integrated into the APK section of the Google Play Developer Console, making it available to all Android developers.

Inside SQL Server Pro Magazine November 2013   Tuesday 12 November

Improve your SQL Server Integration Services experience with the tips given in the November issue of SQL Server Pro Magazine.

Orion 4.0 Released   Tuesday 12 November

The Eclipse Orion team has released the latest version of its web-based IDE. Orion 4.0 has improvements to the client side UI, the server and the core code.

UPDATE 2: Is Bitcoin Broken - A Response And A Conference   Tuesday 12 November

Gavin Andresen of the Bitcoin Foundation has responded to the academic paper that points out a flaw in the Bitcoin algorithm. There is also a new conference workshop to deal with Bitcoin security matters. The debate moves on - see latest updates.

Go Is Four   Monday 11 November

Go has reached the ripe old age of four years old. Is it all grown up yet?

Get Ready For Hour Of Code   Monday 11 November

Tutorials for use in delivering the Hour of Code during CSEdWeek (December 9-15) are now available in preview. Schools across the US are urged to register before November 15th in order to win laptops or a video chat with Bill Gates.

Google Chrome Blocks Add-Ons   Monday 11 November

Google is to block all add-ons for the Chrome browser unless they are downloaded from its own Chrome web store.

Robots For Kids And Developers   Sunday 10 November

Play-i, a Californian start up of former engineers for Google, Apple and Frog Design, is taking pre-orders for Yana, a storyteller robot, and Bo, an explorer.  Although the initial batch of "consumer" robots has already sold out there's still the opportunity to obtain first edition models by being among the first 100 devs with the API.

Facebook 2014 Hacker Cup Starts Early   Sunday 10 November

In previous years the Facebook Hacker Cup has started in January. However, the 2014 event kicks off, with the 3-day online qualification round, on November 21st, 2013, the online elimination rounds are in December and only the Onsite Finals will take place in 2014.

Amazon Source - What Do Bookstores Think?   Saturday 09 November

In the same week at the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9" became available to US customers, Amazon introduced Amazon Source, a new program that enables independent bookstores and other retailers to sell Kindle devices and in return receive 10% of the revenue from every Kindle e-book sold for a two-year period.

Microsoft Extends Bounty   Friday 08 November

Microsoft has opened up its reward scheme that offers a $100,000 bounty for new mitigation bypass techniques to enable more individuals and organizations to participate.

Amazon Insights SDK   Friday 08 November

Developers of mobile apps will be able to track their usage and test interface changes with two new services from Amazon that have been added to the Insights SDK.

Skype Relents On API - At Least Part Way   Thursday 07 November

In response to requests from developers and its business partners, Sykpe has decided to continue support for call recording and hardware devices in its Desktop API.

Microsoft and Facebook Launch Internet Bug Bounty Scheme   Thursday 07 November

Microsoft and Facebook are jointly sponsoring a new initiative to improve the security of the Internet stack by offering cash for discovering security holes.

Windows And Phone Dev Accounts Merged - Now Cheaper!   Thursday 07 November

When did we get used to the idea that you had to pay money to release a program into the wild? The big news from Microsoft seems to be that now it will charge you an annual subscription of only $19 for creating public apps on either or both Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8.

The Core

SQL Server: Quickly get row counts for tables, heaps, indexes, and partitions   Thursday 07 November

How do you quickly get a count of the number of rows in a table? This small utility will enable you to quickly get row counts for tables, heaps, indexes and partitions. It works with SQL Server 2005 and higher.

History

Gary Kildall - CP/M, Digital Research and GEM   Tuesday 12 November

Gary Kildall is someone who had most influence during the early days of the microcomputer revolution. Because of the way history unfolded not much of his legacy is visible today - but he was an important pioneer and one of the first people to take microprocessors seriously.