A few weeks ago I discovered my daughter, Madeline, was having some trouble with learning her spelling words at school.

In previous years, she was given a ten words to learn at the start of the week, and tested on those ten words at the end of the week. This year, I guess because she's older, she's been given a list of one hundred words to learn for the term, and each week she's tested on ten words at random.

Last week I attended one of Microoft's "Windows Camp" developer days looking at Windows 8. The morning was a series of informative talks, followed by a hands on lab building a Windows 8 Metro app.

One of the highlights of the day was the opportunity to use the beta of Visual Studio 11, and the experience of working in such a visually different environment.

It doesn't suck.