With the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) around the corner,
I half expected things to get pretty quiet ahead of the show. So imagine our
surprise when the Redmondians began peppering us with new information about
upcoming dev-related products like Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4.0, the
"Dublin" app server and the "Oslo" modeling and repository
initiative.
Updates to Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) took center stage in a recent
blog post by Microsoft Developer Division Senior Vice President S. "Soma"
Somasegar. He said the next version of Microsoft's VSTS will allow developers
to more easily test for and isolate bugs.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 10/07/20080 comments
If no news is good news, then the news we got from Microsoft last week was
very good news indeed. Microsoft, you see, has released the official names of
the upcoming versions of .NET Framework and Visual Studio.
Don't get me wrong, sometimes a name can be news. Like when Microsoft revealed
to us that the name for WPF/E would be "Silverlight." Or when we all
learned that two of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's children
are named Trig and Track. That last example, I suppose, provides some comfort
as we learn that Microsoft is working to launch Visual Studio 2010 and .NET
Framework 4.0.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 09/30/20082 comments
If you've been reading
Redmond Developer News
the past couple years,
you may recall seeing the name Andrew Brust in our pages from time to
time. As chief of New Technology at consulting firm twentysix New York, vice
chairman of the New York Software Industry Association and a Microsoft Regional
Director (RD), Brust is a leading light in .NET development.
He also happens to be an active contributor to our VSLive!
family of developer conferences, serving as conference chair of the VSLive!
New York show earlier this month. It's no surprise, given the breadth of his
technical acumen, that our editors often turn to Brust to help us place the
events of the day into context for our audience of Microsoft- and .NET-aligned
development managers.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 09/25/20081 comments
In the course of writing an upcoming cover feature on Google Chrome and its
impact on Google's Web platform aspirations, I had a 30-minute talk with Brendan
Eich. In addition to being the chief technical officer of Mozilla Corp., the
commercial entity behind Firefox development, Eich also happens to be the creator
of the JavaScript programming language.
JavaScript, of course, is central to AJAX-based development and to Google's
Web strategy. Eich said that developers shouldn't be too quick to abandon JavaScript
development for proprietary rich Internet application (RIA) frameworks like
Silverlight and Adobe Flex.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 09/23/20084 comments
It's taken nine months, but the brewing financial calamity sparked by the meltdown
of subprime real estate loans is finally getting the full attention it deserves
from the media and public. With the Dow losing ground in chunks and long-standing
financial institutions teetering on the edge of -- or falling into -- outright
insolvency, it's clear that we're facing a major economic crisis.
Of course, our readers have been here before. In 2000, when the dot-com bubble
burst and put an abrupt end to the hyper-optimistic chicanery that gave birth
to companies like Pets.com and Flooz.com, the developer and IT communities were
particularly hard-hit. We, after all, stood at ground zero of the event. Tech
spending crashed. Vibrant Web startups shuttered. And major telecom players
like Lucent and WorldCom shed thousands of jobs.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 09/18/20080 comments
It's hardly surprising that Google's new Chrome browser would shake up the
browser market and incite all sorts of hand-wringing and speculation about the
impact Chrome might have on Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser. After
all, Google's browser enjoys a level of immediate brand awareness and mindshare
that the Mozilla Foundation, despite four years of hard labor on Firefox, must
truly envy.
The funny thing is, Google's Chrome browser, at least in the short-term, is
likely to impact IE the least of all the browser alternatives on the market.
Peter O'Kelly, principal analyst for O'Kelly Consulting, said large swaths of
Microsoft's market share, especially within organizations, are protected by
the need for the browser to be compatible with existing business apps. And many
of those were tuned specifically for IE.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 09/16/20082 comments
RDN
editors Jeffrey Schwartz and Kathleen Richards were in New York
City for the
VSLive! New York conference
this week and came away impressed with the amount of activity and forward-looking
presentations at the 15-year-old confab.
In fact, VSLive! seemed to officially kick off the run-up to Microsoft's Professional
Developers Conference (PDC), slated for the last week of October. For instance,
VSLive! featured a number of presentations germane to Microsoft's Oslo software
modeling and enterprise repository project. Oslo is widely expected to play
center stage at PDC next month. You can read more about Oslo and Microsoft's
modeling efforts here.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 09/11/20080 comments
As some of you may know, the VSLive!
New York conference is taking place this week in Manhattan. This long-running
confab has been helping Visual Studio programmers and .NET development managers
grapple with technical challenges for years. RDN Executive Editor Jeffrey
Schwartz is at the event and offers his insight:
While Microsoft has had little to say about Google jumping
into the browser market, .NET developers certainly have shown interest.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/09/20082 comments
When Google surprised folks by
releasing
its Chrome browser
this week, it caused quite a stir. A lot of the excitement,
of course, stems from the unique competitive challenge Google poses to Microsoft.
Make no mistake: Mozilla and Apple have done great things with Firefox and
Safari -- literally motivating Redmond to reanimate an IE dev team that had
been frozen in carbonite since IE 6 shipped. But those organizations aren't
a serious threat to unseat Windows as a dominant platform.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 09/04/20083 comments
Google today announced the beta release of its
open
source Chrome Web browser
. Based on the WebKit rendering engine and featuring
the new V8 JavaScript engine for accelerating the performance of JavaScript
code, Chrome could quickly challenge Internet Explorer and Firefox as a leading
Web browser.
As RDN Executive Editor Jeffrey Schwartz reports, industry analysts
believe Google's Chrome will have an impact that extends far beyond the browser
market. In an interview, IDC Program Director Al Hilwa described Chrome as "Google's
platform play."
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 09/02/200810 comments
If you read
RDN
, you know we've closely followed the fate of the once-legendary
Borland Developer Tools Group (DTG). The group that gave us the modern integrated
development environment (IDE) and the Delphi programming language had spent
a couple of years in limbo as Borland re-invented itself as an application lifecycle
management (ALM) solutions vendor.
First the dev tools unit was publicly put on the block, but Borland got no
serious takers. Then in November 2006, Borland spun off DTG as a wholly owned
subsidiary called CodeGear. The unit continued to advance its products and tools,
but was pinched by the increasingly broad managed tools push from Microsoft
and the growth in Web-based development.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 08/28/200811 comments