On Friday, December 16, I had a special visitor come speak to my programming classes. His name is Brandon McMillon. His official title is Academic Developer Evangelist. He lives in Tampa and covers Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. He started working for Microsoft in 1996, working for the Visual Interdev test team. In 1999, he moved to the Windows product team, spending 5 years there as a program manager and lead program manager. He was involved with shipping Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows...

This is in response to a question about our school system's policy toward giving support and training to teachers along with new hardware. Well, the situation is not perfect by a long shot but they are making an effort. In fact the RFP for the laptop initiative included training to be provided by the vendor on the equipment. That is the good news. The bad news is that the training was mixed. Some good, some so-so, and some really bad. In terms of on-going support, my school (2100 students) has 2...

Whenever I get to array data structures or strings in my classes, it is always with some trepidation that I point out that array indices start at 0 not 1, as might seem more natural to a beginning programmer. If the class is the non-questioning sort, I just go on. But if some one asks, "Why?", and I think they can handle it, I take the opening. Most of these students have no real understanding of what a compiler or translator is or does. This is a chance to explain on a level they can understand,...

The continuation of my day at Windows XP training has been delayed a few days while I battled a "home made" dose of food poisoning. The details are quite gruesome, so I won't post them here. Suffice it to say that I have been weak, without energy, (more than usual ;-) for the past few days. But I'm good to go now. The bulk of the day of XP training was spent covering several modules in a Microsoft Official Course book, #2261B, Supporting Users Running the Microsoft Windows XP Operating System. The...