Windows Developer News... Offline Docs, DirectCompute lecture series update, and more!
This week, the DirectCompute lecture series was featured on Channel 9 and the Jason Yang from AMD will be answering questions in response to the Basics of DirectCompute Application Developmentvideo. So, if you have DirectCompute questions, jump in there - this is your chance to interface with industry leaders. Some of the sample code discussed in the videos can be grabbed from the NVIDIA DirectCompute SDK Code Samples page if you want to poke around in their demos.
I discovered that the offline documentation changed in Windows SDK 1.7. In short, the newest version of the SDK now ships with a system that synchronizes content from the cloud to your workstation for offline documentation viewing. Since I made the post I probed around for the reasoning behind it and the best answer I could find is that it very much simplifies the story for the content shipping with Visual Studio in the box and the content that ships with the SDK. A little confusing, but it is pretty nice to know that the latest documentation is now in your offline experience if you can't get on the internet.
Long before my time at Microsoft... I mean, long in "internet time", before my time at Microsoft most developers received their documentation with their MSDN subscription which was mailed out annually to subscribers. When we were on this publishing cycle, the content would get locked down before being published into a shipping form for the subscription cycles. I'd imagine it was pretty difficult for the content publishing teams to manage that entire process, considering how tough it was for me to synchronize the PDC whitepaper content last year. Anyways, MSDN Subscriptions are still around, but I think people for the most part just download the releases that are shared with them. Oh, speaking of which, if you are interested in Cloud development with Azure and have an MSDN subscription, you get free access to the Azure services for the next 16 months. Pretty wicked!
Some short reminders:
Windows Connect lets you file bugs against some Microsoft products.
The video introduction to creating world-ready applicationswas published. If you are creating an application that is going to be published, released, or accessible globally, you should check out this video. Ashwani shows you why you should care about localization, localizability, and shows a number of important scenarios if you Go Global.
Have a great weekend!
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