Erik Meijer

Erik Meijer, a former computer science professor at the Univerity of Utrecht, is an accomplished programming-language designer who has worked on a wide range of languages, including Haskell, Mondrian, X#, Cω, C#, and Visual Basic.

He runs the Cloud Programmability Team at Microsoft, where his primary focus has been to remove the impedance mismatch between databases and programming languages.

One of the fruits of these efforts is LINQ, which allows developers to query data sources other than tables, such as objects or XML.

Most recently, Erik has been working on democratizing the Cloud using Volta and preaching the virtues of fundamentalist functional programming in the new age of concurrency and many-core. Some people might recognize him from his brief stint as the "Head in the Box" on Microsoft VBTV.

These days, you can watch him @ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/emeijer/ErikMeijer.html

X#

X# (pronounced X-sharp) is a general-purpose, XML-oriented Web application programming language created by Intalio. It is at the core of products like IntalioCloud. It is also functionally equivalent to Salesforce.com's Visualforce programming language. Learn more about it @ http://www.intalio.com/x-sharp and http://www.gocosmos.org/blog/20080428.en.aspx

Cω

Cω is a research programming language. It can be written (and searched for) as Cw or the "Comega language". Learn more about it @ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/comega/

The Reactive Extensions (Rx)...

The Reactive Extensions (Rx)......is a library to compose asynchronous and event-based programs using observable collections and LINQ-style query operators. Learn more about it @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/gg577609

Two jQuery Books

Two useful books on jQuery which is to JavaScript like what the Standard Template Library is to C++!

jQuery Cookbook by Cody Lindley

jQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault & Yehuda Katz.

Refactoring Resources

A Taxonomy for "Bad Code Smells" @ http://www.soberit.hut.fi/mmantyla/badcodesmellstaxonomy.htm

Martin Fowler's Refactoring site @ http://www.refactoring.com/

There are also the following tools:

ReSharper @ http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

Visual Assist X (for C++) @ http://www.wholetomato.com/products/featureRefactoring.asp

Multimodal Architecture and Specifications

These are standards for integrating multimodal capabilities such as speech, recognition, gesture recognition, and biometrics in software applications. Learn more about them @

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-multimodarch1/

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-multimodarch2/

and

http://www.w3.org/TR/mmi-arch/

The Cloud vs. IT: Is Your Job in Jeopardy?

From the Redmonde Magazine

"... there's a new threat to IT: the cloud. The typical vendor push is this: Let us have your data and your apps, and because we're so efficient, you can reduce the workforce -- you know, all those pesky IT folks who keep machines running, data secure and performance up to snuff. That's one reason many in IT resist the cloud. It's like outsourcing their jobs to Amazon.com Inc. or Google Inc. or Microsoft.

Others see the cloud as just another evolution of IT, and nothing much to worry about. In fact, they see it as something to embrace. But for nearly everyone in IT, when it comes to the cloud, issues of cost, security, data control and integrity, and job loss are present in one way or another."