Is it possible for anyone to give Microsoft a fair trial? The first half of 2012 is in the history books. Yet the firm still cannot seem to shake the public opinion as The Evil Empire that produces crap code.

I am in a unique position. I joined the orbit of Microsoft in 1973 after the Army decided it didn't need photographers flying around in helicopters in Vietnam anymore. I was sent to Fort Lewis and assigned to 9th Finance because I had a smattering of knowledge about computers. And the Army was going to a computerized payroll system.

Bill and Paul used the University of Washington's VAX PDP computer to create BASIC for the Altair computer. Certainly laughable by today's standards, it is the very roots of the home computer.

Microsoft became successful because it delivered what people wanted.

In Python, we can create three types of methods in a class:  instance or regular method, classmethod and staticmethod.  Instance methods are associated, as the name infers, with an instance or object of the class and take self as the first parameter.  Classmethods take a reference to the class, cls, as the first parameter of the class.  Staticmethods, for the most part, are convenience methods that could be declared as functions since they really do not have much to do with the class itself.  They were probably added at some time after the advent of Python in order to make the language more object oriented i.e. minimize the number of free floating functions. 

Refer the our article static, class and regular methods in Python for a detailed explanation on this subject.

A string in Python is enclosed in either single or double quotes.  Therefore, either one does the trick.  A common practice is to place single words with no characters that can be interpolated in single quotes and multi-word strings that contain interpolated characters in double quotes.  This may be a carry over from Perl where interpolated characters are in double quotes. 

If you do not want to interpolate a string, use a raw string ... r"\n".  With the exception of the last print statement, each of the print statements prints hello on a separate line from how are you?.  They are great for regular expressions.

Finally, triple double quotes """ some message about a function or class ... """ are used for docstrings.

print "hello \n how are you?"
print 'hello \n how are you?'
print r"hello \n how are you?"

.NET is a highly popular programming language from Microsoft that continues to rock the IT industry since its inception almost twelve years ago. Simply stated, it is a development framework comprising of multiple modules that helps in creating Web Applications, Windows Applications as well as Mobile Applications. The demand for .NET programmers saw a definite surge in the last decade - thanks to the evolution of the smart phones.

Listed below are some of the recent and prevalent aspects of .Net

ASP .NET - Web API

Microsoft considers Web AP I as the future of ASP .NET. The world of web is heading towards a simpler, lightweight, REST based services. Web API makes it possible with the ASP.NET MVC without the heavy lifting that WCF requires. jQuery could be utilized for displaying results in front end of the page as shown in the example in Microsoft site.