InfoWorld has a report showing the results of tests breaking down the differences between Indian and American programmers. While the results are interesting (Indian developers do better in math, U.S. programmers do better working with languages), I think that much of it is irrelevant. Yes, the thinking skills that make you good at math help you program better. And of course you need knowledge of programming languages to write software. But at the end of the day, there are so many things that go into being a good developer, from time management and communications skills to having good coding practices around source control, testing, and debugging, that I think it is hard to make a generalized statement about a group of developers based on standardized tests given online.
Language/library updates
BlackBerry WebWorks 2.1 SDK for phones
BlackBerry WebWorks 2.1 SDK for smartphones was released to catch up with the earlier release in June of the SDK for tablets.
ASP.NET MVC 4 roadmap
The ASP.NET MVC team released the roadmap for MVC 4. It’s nice to get an idea of where the platform is headed.
Tools and products
ReSharper 6 is out
ReSharper, one of the most popular Visual Studio add-ons, has been updated to version 6. The improvement list looks nice.
Jaspersoft Studio for Eclipse
Java developers have a new option for BI tools: Jaspersoft Studio for Eclipse.
CloudBees Toolkit for Eclipse
CloudBees released a toolkit for Eclipse that makes it easy to debug and deploy cloud application straight from Eclipse.
Editorial and commentary
Why give your application an offensive name?
Violet Blue on ZDNet reports on the “Pantyshot” Python package, and the effect that giving this package such a name has had on the Python community.
Be careful when combining declarative and imperative code
Bill Wagner, writing for Microsoft, posted a good article showing the pitfalls of mixing imperative and declarative code.
AppStore prices on the rise
The average price of iOS apps is up to $1.44, a 14% increase compared to 2010. That’s good news for iOS devs; it looked like a race to the bottom.
Tips and tricks
Using ASP.NET MVC’s ActionResult to return content
Dino Esposito at Simple-Talk has a tutorial showing how to use the ActionResult class in ASP.NET MVC to provide different types of content.
Events
RIM Hackathon
RIM is holding a BlackBerry Messenger coding event August 11 and 12 in New York City.
J.Ja
