The Kaggle/StackOverflow contest officially closed a few days ago, which makes it a perfect time to have a miniature retrospective on that experience. The objective of the contest was to write an algorithm to predict whether a StackOverflow question would be closed by moderators, and the reason why. The contest was announced just a couple of days before what was supposed to be 4 weeks of computer-free vacation travelling around Europe. Needless to say, a quick change of plans followed; I am a big fan of S[...]

Visual Studio 2012 has been out for a while now, I’ve been using it every day at work and I’m generally very happy with it. The biggest win is the performance, which is some much better than VS2010. I’ve finally begun to get curious about the new stuff in VS2012. Visual Studio was delivered with .NET 4.5 a shiny new version of the .NET framework, that will allow developers to create “Metro” style apps (which for reason that are too silly to go into are no longer called Metro style apps, but we will c[...]

Things are changing at Microsoft (or maybe they changed a while ago and it took me all this time to notice). The short story is the company no longer cares whether you use their development tools, they only care that you target their platforms: Windows 8 and Windows Azure.   The result is this, Microsoft is in the process of opening up Software Development tool chain. They no longer see themselves as the owners of .NET, or at perhaps more accurately some of the technologies around .NET (i.e. ASP.NET, Entit[...]