Microsoft has a team of people who concern themselves with non-professional programmers. This includes students, hobbyists, and anyone who isn't primarily paid to write code, but finds themselves writing it anyway, typically at home and on their own nickel. (Apparently they outnumber professional developers four to one.) John Montgomery, of that team, says that non-professional programmers use HTML and Javascript the most, followed by (believe it or not) C++. While I suppose the presence of CS students who are taking C++ courses must skew the numbers, I still find it surprising. There are a lot of languages that are easier to pick up and noodle with in your free time than C++. I think it shows that people will move towards a tool that does what they need.

Kate

It's time again for an update to the TIOBE Programming Community Index. I blogged about this a while back, and it's time to notice it again. This index measures only how often a programming language is mentioned by name - in people's resumes, in job ads, in tutorials, even in explanations of other languages or comparisons between languages. It is an interesting measure of which languages people consider relevant in conversation or in describing themselves.

C++ has moved up from 4th overall to 3rd (still behind Java and C, pulling ahead of Perl) but if you look back over the last five years, it's clear less people are bringing C++ into their conversations than they once did:

What I find most confusing is the tiny numbers for C#. Oh sure, I know this is just a graph of the top ten, and things like Ruby aren't even here, but to be neck and neck with Delphi over all this time? That's kind of strange. There are obviously large swaths of the internet where I don't normally go, where people talk about Delphi a lot.

I wonder what's the uptick of Java talk over the last year? Could it be all the "Java is over" articles? By the way the steep drop for C++ and Java in April 2004 is an artifact as a result of a Google cleanup-clearout, and since then the index includes more search engines.

Kate

A little bird shared with me the snack highlights for Tech Ed 2006:

1,250,000 pieces of "Mikes & Ikes" will be consumed over the course of a week at Tech Ed 2006
18,750 pounds of salad will be prepared and offered at meals
83,700 ice cream novelty/ fruit and yogurt bars have been ordered for this function
60,000 eggs will be eaten by attendees at breakfast (this is equal to 4,800 dozen cartons of eggs)
It will take 4 semis to transport the 150,000 bottles of water consumed on this show
The total amount of fruit ordered will fill 3/4 of full size tractor-trailer
1.6 million ounces of coffee will be poured and consumed (conservative estimate)
More than 50,000 pounds of carbohydrates will be consumed at Tech*Ed (Atkins who?)
1,500 table cloths will be used and re-set on a daily basis:  (7,500 for the week)
A minimum of 2,000 antacid tablets are likely to be consumed at this event

Now it just so happens that after my very first Tech Ed (Dallas, 1999, as an attendee on a press pass) I got some stats on snacks that year:

Anyone care to compare and contrast?

Kate

I'm surely not the only one who's noticed that most of the blogs by members of the Visual C++ team have one thing in common: they're not updated terribly often. Typically there's one team member (maybe someone with insomnia?) updating one while the others languish. So now it seems they've decided to make a group go of it with the Visual C++ Team Blog. It appeared yesterday and has had two entries so far. I hope it gets lots of updates!

Kate

Our free "what is SharePoint" seminar went off without a hitch on a grey cool Peterborough afternoon. The recurring theme from attendees, as well as some contacts I invited who couldn't make it, was "is it really free? How can that be?" Windows SharePoint Services really is free with Windows Server 2003. Here's a quote from the Microsoft site:

Now shipping as part of Windows Server 2003 R2 or available for download at no additional charge, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services technology in Windows Server 2003 is an integrated portfolio of collaboration and communication services designed to connect people, information, processes, and systems both within and beyond the organizational firewall.

It really is free. Tell your friends!

We got a few inquiries from folks who lived a little too far away to attend and they asked about a webcast or another location. Please leave a comment if you or someone you know would like to attend one of these, either real or virtual. We just spent an hour and a half putting WSS through its paces and showing what it does out of the box.

Kate

I came across a page full of pictures that play with perspective and scale:

The artist's page gives you thumbnails that don't always show the cool part of the picture. This fan page has a whole pile of them all one after another to get you started seeing how they work. There are more at the artist's page though, plus instructions on how you can buy prints, so even if you start at the fan page, you should end up at the artist's page. According to Wikipedia and another article I found recently, he's a Canadian who illustrates children's books and wins awards for it. That explains all the snow, moonlight, and autumn leaves, I guess .

Kate

While helping a client with the mechanics of localization recently, I came across a very thoughtful blog entry. It goes beyond what properties you set on a form or what method you call to look up a resource, and instead talks about some of the project management aspects of localization. If you have any chance that you'll need alternate language support, you should read this post. He talks to timing (too soon and translators will translate buttons that later go away or have a name change, but don't wait too long because it's hard to estimate how long translating and testing will take), QA, reuse, and context. Excellent things to consider before you start building those satellite assemblies.

Kate

If you don't subscribe to the Flash, you really should. It's an email notification about upcoming events, training, webcasts, case studies, and other information sources. You can personalize it so you only get information you care about, and you'll always be "in the loop" about upcoming opportunities.

Right now, they're running a pair of contests around the Flash:

• New subscribers to MSDN Flash who sign up before June 28 2006 are entered into a draw for a $16,800 desktop prize package.

• Existing subscribers (like me) who personalize their subscription before June 28, 2006 could win a $5,000 Microsoft Training Package.

Not bad, eh? Just the other day someone asked me "how do you find all these webcasts and things?" The Flash is how.

Kate