As an ASP.NET developer I am really, really excited about this.

In the past few years nothing new has come from Microsoft that has really been a big deal. MVC and Razor were great and a pretty big deal, but everything else didn't really affect my day to day job of developing apps.

Deploying ASP.NET apps has always been a real pain in the neck. Sure, in theory it's as easy as xcopy, but once your apps start growing and your configuration grows it rapidly becomes a bigger thing to maintain. It takes a lot of time, there's lots of stuffing around, it's very fiddly and generally a PITA.

If I understand it all correctly, being able to package up my application into a sort of "mini vm", that has everything pre-configured, would be absolutely bloody amazing. Having it run on this new "Nano Server" thing sounds fantastic - it doesn't have a GUI or 32 bit support, so in my mind it should be much faster, quicker and much easier for remote administration.

I've been waiting for this announcement ever since I wrapped my head around ASP.NET vnext, and now that I think I get it, the future is looking cool. Good job MS.

What's the difference between a software developer and a programmer? One develops software by programming, and the other programs computers to develop software.

Troy Hunt has a great article here on the responsibility of public disclosure:

http://www.troyhunt.com/2013/0...

I wrote a blog post on this a few years ago and I think it's still pretty relevant today:

http://programmers.blogoverflo...

I think the main thing that most people skip is how to work alongside other developers, and how to write maintainable code.

You seem like a cool guy.

I think his own comment sums everything up quite nicely:

I don't have enough in-depth knowledge to know to what extent de-skilling is really happening

Anyone who thinks that programming is getting easier due to automation isn't a programmer.

Please upvote this a million times.

The link to the actual article "a unified release" is completely empty... nice to see all the comments from people who haven't even read the article yet.

> When we meet our initial goal of $1,000,000, we will launch a new version of Reading Rainbow on the single most-used digital platform: the web.

A million dollars for an "interactive" website? Clearly this man is a marketing genius.

...when the sales and marketing and pointy-haired businessmen try to manipulate you

You have entirely missed the point of the book. It is not about manipulation. It's about being genuine and being persuasive. They are different things.

I definitely agree that it is good to know when and how someone is trying to persuade you something, and it's a very valuable skill to increase your communication skills.

"as a geek type you'll likely never be able to pull it off anyway"

Resigning yourself to having bad communication is not helpful - it is possible to vastly improve your communication skills, you can do it and you should learn how.

"How To Win Friends and Influence People" By Dale Carnegie.

A classic, every programmer (and person) should read it.

Relax buddy.

There's plenty of time for you to get into a job and begin working for the next 40 years of your life.

Enjoy university. Travel during your holidays. Volunteer. Go to church. Go ice skating. Play with lego. Don't do drugs. Floss.

I'd rather say their creation proved that CSS needed to be fixed

Fixed that for you.

Some more brilliant standards by w3c:

Unlike other CSS properties, custom property names are case-sensitive.

Fantastic! Let's make some things case sensitive and some things not! Genius! If you're going to introduce something new (like, you know, VARIABLES), you might as well make it break all of your existing conventions.

Now even better, here's how you define a variable:

var-my-color: #06c;

And here's how you reference it:

color: var(my-color);

Oh that makes sense. You declare it as var-name but then when referencing it you refer to it as var(name)! Wow just like that other language... ooh um... oh yeah NONE OF THEM.

Honestly this is the reason why web development is utter hell. Confusing and stupid standards that no-one bothers to stick to.

And why the hell can't I do width: 50% - 10px? What century are we living in again?

I can't believe that $2,000,000 has already been pledged. I assume by "audiophiles".

Hey guys, 99% of mastering these days has been brickwalled. The recordings that you're buying and downloading before encoding, at the mastering stage has already had all "the nuances, the soft touches, and the ends on the echo" removed. You can't get that back. In fact, all this device will do is make these artifacts more obvious.

Getting a 30 gazillion kbps FLAC file is utterly pointless when the same data can be represented in a 320kbs mp3 file.

I can personally guarantee* (*worth nothing, not redeemable for anything) that sound studios will not start producing multiple mixes just for the audiophiles. It's just not going to happen. People do not care about this stuff and are happy with their iphones/androids, so the sound studios are not going to bother.