When posting about something in the tech world, make sure it is safe for work.

I also have been known to eat trolls for breakfast.

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.

This thing has been in the tech news everywhere all week. John Gruber from Daring Fireball just wrote a piece that really puts the whole thing in context. It was a very good read.

http://daringfireball.net/2009/07/chrome_os_context

My thoughts:
I really think that he hit the nail on the head when it comes down to eating your own dog food. Especially when it comes to developing for a platform. I am interested in seeing how their OS stands up.

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.

1. Brainfuck

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.

Swordfish
Live Free or Die Hard
Independence Day
Hackers
The Core
Virtuousity
The NET
Sneakers
Matrix Reloaded