According to the Voice of China "News Coverage" report. When Apple products are changing  the world, the original computer giant Microsoft is also quietly looking for their new foothold in the field of electronics. This time the breakthrough is from its game console Xbox.Xbox was originally a single function console, there are signs that Microsoft may be planning for the Xbox into the computer with new functions. The selling point of this new product lies in its function of communication and interaction with people. Through the identification of human expression actions, the person may no...

Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft loves open-source. No, really! Don’t believe me? Read on: Today, Microsoft announced that it is open-sourcing all of its flagship web/cloud platform: ASP.NET MVC Web Pages (aka Razor), Web API. Importantly … these projects will be publicly hosted and that the team will continue development in the open (you’ll be able to view the repository and see the code commits as they happen) and that Microsoft will even consider code submissions, fixes, improvements & features contributed by 3rd parties. This isn’t th...

Updated 2011-11-28: Added reference to the walkthrough of using LocalDB in Visual Studio 2010 and to the new LocalDB Installer.Updated 2011-11-02: Added reference to .NET Framework 4 support for LocalDB in the Q&A section.IntroductionIt gives me great pleasure to introduce a new version of SQL Express called SQL Express LocalDB.LocalDB is created specifically for developers. It is very easy to install and requires no management, yet it offers the same T-SQL language, programming surface and client-side providers as the regular SQL Server Express. In effect the developers that target SQL Se...

Ok, I relent. Everyone wants to know why I left and answering individually isn’t scaling so here it is, laid out in its long form. Read a little (I get to the punch line in the 3rd paragraph) or read it all. But a warning in advance: there is no drama here, no tell-all, no former colleagues bashed and nothing more than you couldn’t already surmise from what’s happening in the press these days surrounding Google and its attitudes toward user privacy and software developers. This is simply a more personal telling.It wasn’t an easy decision to leave Google. During my t...

Every year, many people will send their resume to Microsoft and Google. So how do these IT companies hire people? What kind of interview questions will they ask. Let's see what Microsoft asked before in this article. These questions are more focusing on how you are reasoning, not necessary your technical skills. 1.  You’ve got someone working for you for seven days and a gold bar to pay them. The gold bar is segmented into seven connected pieces. You must give them a piece of gold at the end of every day. If you are only allowed to make two breaks in the gold bar, how do you pay you...

Remember that feeling you got back when Steve Jobs was unveiling the iPhone, and he did the “slide to unlock” gesture for the first time? I remember the way he said it – “You like that? Want to see it again?”Since then I haven’t seen a lock screen interface that has made me feel that same “how obvious, how elegant!” feeling – until today at the NVIDIA press conference, and later at the Microsoft keynote here at CES. It sounds a little silly, sure, making such a big deal of such a small feature, but it’s just nice to see a genuinely na...

In C++/CLR (for Microsoft), sometimes we need to convert int to System::String type or vice versa. The simple way is :From System::String^ to int int num= int::Parse(str); // System::String^ to intFrom int to System::String^System::String^ str = num.ToString(); // int to System::String^For all the other data types, similar ways can be adopted....

Summary: Could and should Bill Gates return to day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft? Fortune is reporting there’s a rumor to that effect. Fortune reported on December 8 that there’s talk Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates might be mulling a comeback, largely to help boost Microsoft’s stagnant stock price and employee morale.I have to say I am very, very, very skeptical on this one.First, it seems this is a single-sourced report. Fortune says: “One prominent chief executive told Fortune he’d heard from someone close to Gat...