Happy Friday! Here's an incredible set of reader questions, many tied to important debates, to get the weekend started a bit early. Theories about the future AnOldAmigaUser asks: On FRD this morning you were discussing Brad's daughter having to use a Chromebook. You mentioned that kids growing up with Google apps would expect to use…

Google just announced a new AI-based "browser-based development experience" for creating full-stack web and multiplatform apps.

Apple's developer story contrasts sharply with the visions and solutions offered by Google and Microsoft. That's probably not surprising at a high level, but what may be surprising is how similar Google and Microsoft are in this regard. As I'm sure you know, Apple held its annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) this week, end-capping what…

For the past several years, Microsoft has done what it can to make Windows the ideal environment for developers. But now it has AI.

Well, it's finally May, and the weather is finally warming after a terrible April, but don't go outside until you've read through this mammoth installment of Ask Paul. There's a lot going on this week. PC upgrade noelt1955 asks: Hi Paul. I retired early last year and am currently using a (docked) Surface Pro 3…

Canonical today announced the release of its latest flagship Linux distribution, Ubuntu Desktop 23.04, which features a new installer, Azure AD authentication, improved gaming performance, and more.

As happens with most popular Microsoft brands, Visual Studio is used as the name for several different products, some of which have little to do with each other. There's the flagship Visual Studio integrated developer environment (IDE), which came to life in the 1990s as Developer Studio and runs only on Windows. There's Visual Studio…

Declarative UI is at least as old as the World Wide Web, but it’s become hip again in the modern mobile/web era thanks to React Native and Flutter, and, even more recently, Swift UI and Jetpack Compose. I was an early web developer, but I wasn’t aware of this term until I belated tackled XAML…

I've long wanted to switch to Markdown for all of my writing, but I have struggled to find an editor that meets my needs. That struggle continues, frankly. But I've recently found myself--and not for the first time--intrigued by the possibility of using the Visual Studio Code developer editor for this purpose. That it was…

Comedian Bill Burr decided to learn how to play drums in his 40s, a curiously late time in life to take on such a demanding activity, and one that has absolutely nothing to do with how he earns a living. By all accounts, however, he’s killing it, and despite his joking on the topic, he’s…

Happy Friday! We sold our house and are freaking out, so let’s kick off this weekend a bit early with another great round of reader questions. History books j5 asks: Paul I think I’ve read a few times on the site that you’re a big history buff, maybe even WWII. What are some of your…

Citing its 900 million users and rapid growth, Microsoft is now promoting the Microsoft Store in Windows as the go-to opportunity for developers.

.NET MAUI is the successor to Xamarin Forms and it obviously isn’t the first cross-platform framework to target both mobile and desktop. But it’s positioned similarly to competitors like Flutter or React Native. That is, no developer will ever use .NET MAUI to create a new app that only runs on Windows. Instead, MAUI is…

When I first started writing the poorly-named Programming Windows series in mid-2019, I eventually ran into a wall named .NET: this was the point in the history I was trying to cover---the very early 2000s---in which I stopped my formal developer work to focus on writing, allowing my employer, Duke Publishing, to handle the backend…

A new survey from Stack Overflow shows that significantly more developers use Linux than a Mac, though Windows maintains a huge lead over both.

Happy Friday! We’re suddenly barreling into the holidays, but here’s another mammoth edition of Ask Paul to kick off the weekend a bit early. Ads in Windows AnOldAmigaUser asks: Part of the argument for ads in Windows and pushing users to Edge and Bing, whether they want that or not, is that Microsoft is not…