As we sat down today to do some performance profiling in Shark, we came to a sudden realization - it doesn't work anymore with iOS4. After some quick Google searching I came across a thread in Apple's developer forum (registration required) that indicated there were no plans to bring iOS4 support to Shark.

So over the last couple years here at Switch On The Code we built up from a very small following to a pretty decent sized web site. Also, over that time frame we have done a few different things with our advertising, to varying degrees of success. Well, we decided it was time to try something new with some of our ads. Specifically, the 125x125 ads on our post pages. We recently moved all of these over to Buy Sell Ads.

It seems that Switch On The Code's traffic has finally surpassed what our poor dedicated machine is capable of handling - or at least I hope that's the problem. A few times last month, especially on weekday mornings, most of our services go down because there just isn't enough memory available to handle them. At the moment, we've been simply restarting the needed services, but that obviously isn't a good solution. We'll be adding some more memory to our machine soon, but until then, please accept our apology if you've attempted to access the site during one of our downtimes.

So we were contacted by M80, who is currently trying to build some momentum around Visual Studio 2010, and they wanted us to tell our readers about a YouTube channel called Developer Stories. I checked out some of the videos and they're not all that bad - mostly interviews with developers about their lives and why they do what they do. We definitely weren't paid to pass along this info, although I wish we were, but I thought it was interesting and worth checking out.

Another year has come and gone here at Switch On The Code and that means it's time to look back at 2009 and how we did. First I have say it was a great year and we really did a lot of new things here. We started podcasting, doing video tutorials, and much more. A new version of the site was launched built completely in Drupal just about 1 year ago exactly. Now I really hope that this year will bring just as many goodies.

Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference has just wrapped up and I've decided to run through an account of what happened and some of the major announcements that have been made.

With July ending, so does our month of Silverlight. All-in-all I think it was an enjoyable experience, however we did start to run out of interesting ideas there towards the end. We've spent an entire month with a Microsoft technology and it's time to shift gears. This time we're going Apple with an entire month dedicated to iPhone tutorials.

Instead of randomly throwing out tutorials for whatever language or framework happened to interest us at that given moment, we've decided to try to focus our tutorials into groups - each lasting one month. As you can probably guess by the title of this post, July is the month of Silverlight.

The data center that holds our dedicated server suffered a power loss yesterday morning that unfortunately took down Switch On The Code for close to 14 hours. This incident, however, really showcases the potential of Twitter's real-time search. A simple query for "crucialparadigm" listed a handful of people experiencing the same outage.

I've strayed outside of Google only a couple of times in my professional career as a programmer, and every time I've raced back shivering and scared at how bad the world is outside of Google's house. When it comes to programming related queries, it's amazing at how unhelpful search engines can be. With the launch of Bing, I've crept outside once again, and I can proudly report that it doesn't suck as much as I expected.