If you've been reading the pages of
Redmond Developer News
lately, you
know that application lifecycle management (ALM) is an increasingly active arena
for solutions providers. Borland famously bet the farm on ALM when it decided
to shift away from the developer tools business in 2006. More recently, software
configuration management (SCM) vendor CollabNet has extended its Subversion
product to incorporate ALM features.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 08/26/20080 comments
Growing up with my younger brother, we used to engage in a dangerous game of
sorts that we called DefCon 1. The goal of the game was to annoy your sibling
as much as possible, without having him actually haul off and hit you. Granted,
the contest was far less dangerous than some of our favorite pastimes, which
included Yard Dart dodging and toboggan rides in the woods. But my brother is
a large man, and if I screwed up I was likely to be sporting a few bruises.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 08/21/20080 comments
Last week, Apple surged past Google with a market cap of just over $157 billion.
I suppose now is an appropriate time to make a confession: I never liked Apple
Computer.
For all the fantastic industrial and consumer design, slippery-smooth hardware
and software integration, and tightly evolved product development, Apple to
me has always been a company that just can't quite get it right. And by "right,"
I mean not demand complete control over everything on its platforms.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 08/19/20088 comments
If you've been reading
Redmond Developer News
, you know that the Beijing
Summer Olympic Games currently underway in China may be of particular interest
to .NET application developers. You see, Microsoft decided to
use
the games as a platform
to showcase its Silverlight rich Internet application
platform.
Go to nbcolympics.com and you'll land
at a rather busy-looking portal page with links to all sorts of Olympics-related
news, video and schedules. Silverlight's role in all this is as the delivery
platform for streaming video of events. For followers of less-than-marquee sports
(I'm talking to you, badminton fans), the site is a huge benefit.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 08/14/20087 comments
So Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is finally here. And as service
packs go, VS08 SP1 is a pretty big deal.
The new bits do more than simply clean up flaws and holes in the shipping versions
of Visual Studio and .NET Framework 3.5. As John
Waters' story reveals, SP1 adds important new features, from innovative
data-handling technologies to game-changing design-time tooling.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 08/12/20080 comments
Brian Chess has forgotten more about application security than I'll ever know.
The founder and chief scientist of security solutions firm Fortify Software
was a speaker at the Black Hat information security conference that concludes
today in Las Vegas. He also served as host of the
Iron
Chef: Fuzzing Challenge
security cook-off at the conference, which offered
attendees a creative alternative to the usual 60-minute PowerPoint presentation
format.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 08/07/20080 comments
As far as I know, my father cannot count to three. Growing up, when my younger
brother and I began to fight, my dad would simply begin to count, loudly, and
we would sprint downstairs. To this day, I don't think my father has ever counted
all the way to three.
I bring this up because a recent
Forrester report about Microsoft taking SharePoint online reminded me of
one of my father's favorite phrases: "Take it outside!" Wrestling
in the den? Take it outside! Fighting over the remote control? Take it outside!
Facing keen opposition from services-savvy competitors? Yeah, take it outside.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 08/05/20080 comments
Anyone who has spent more than a few hours in front of late-night TV has seen
the unintentionally funny commercial for the Hair Club for Men. You know, the
one where the company president proudly announces: "I'm not just the president,
I'm also a client."
Well, Paul Kimmel, longtime enterprise application developer and author of
the new book LINQ
Unleashed for C# (Sams Publishing, 2008), has had a hair club moment
of his own. Only in Kimmel's case, it's over the Language Integrated Query (LINQ)
data access technology introduced as part of .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio
2008.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 07/31/200810 comments
It's no secret that power consumption is a worrying issue among datacenter
managers. As system hardware becomes cheaper and energy costs continue to rise,
IT managers might find that they'll spend more to power and cool a system over
its lifetime than to actually buy it.
Which is why guys like Dan Pritchett, a technical fellow at eBay, has moved
beyond thinking about transactions per second (TPS) with his applications to
focusing on transactions per second per watt (TPS/w).
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 07/29/20080 comments
On
Tuesday
I wrote about a conversation I had with Shaun Walker, founder of the popular
open source DotNetNuke Web application framework for .NET. I wrote about Shaun's
experience founding DotNetNuke and what it's like to be an open source developer
working under .NET.
Based on some of the comments to this entry, I think people might be misreading
the context of the interview. As is clear from the original post, Walker has
enjoyed outstanding access and guidance from Microsoft -- specifically through
the Developer Division (DevDiv) under Scott Guthrie. In fact, it was Guthrie
himself who hooked Walker's team up with key people in Redmond.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 07/24/20084 comments
"We can't stop here. This is bat country!"
Few lines of prose not written by Douglas Adams have made me laugh out loud
the way this brilliant scene from Hunter S. Thompson did. The quote, of course,
comes from the epic desert driving scene in Thompson's novel Fear and Loathing
in Las Vegas. The author and his attorney are barreling down a desert highway,
so pumped full of drugs and chemicals that the author begins hallucinating badly.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 07/22/20087 comments
Back in the heat of the democratic presidential primary race, I used to joke that newly-minted front runner Barack Obama was running against the reanimated zombie corpse of Hillary Clinton. For months, it seemed, Obama would score an emphatic victory, only to give Clinton new life a week or so later with a sub-par result. Obama's failure to close out Clinton helped produce an unnecessary, months-long chase that nearly destroyed both candidates.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 07/15/20081 comments