Microsoft, which just days ago pushed out a Windows Azure SDK for Ruby developers, has released a substantially upgraded SDK for its army of .NET Framework developers.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/30/20130 comments
So, as programmers age, do they get set in their ways? Are they more afraid to learn new things? Are they old dogs that can't learn new tricks?
Nope. In fact, just the opposite, according to some intriguing new research from North Carolina State University. The study examined the profiles of more than 80,000 developers on StackOverflow. Their number-crunching revealed that as coders get older, their interests widen -- in fact, according to the press release, "the researchers found that there is a sharp decline in the number of subjects users weighed in on between the ages of 15 and 30 – but that the range of subjects increased steadily through the programmers' 30s and into their early 50s."
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/30/20130 comments
Ruby developers now have a home on Windows Azure. Microsoft has released the Windows Azure SDK for Ruby, and provided tools and guidance as well.
Since Windows Azure was just released as an Infrastructure-As-A-Service (IaaS), as Microsoft Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie announced on his blog, Ruby projects can be hosted there without an SDK. What the SDK adds is Windows Azure Data Management and the Windows Azure Service Bus. Data storage options include tables, blobs and queues; the service bus provides message queuing and topics and subscriptions.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/29/20130 comments
Microsoft has released a new version of its Enterprise Library, a collection of reusable software components for developers working in large environments, for the first time in three years.
The Library helps with "cross-cutting concerns" like logging, validation, data access, exception handling and so on. Microsoft calls these software components "application blocks". They contain not just source code, but also documentation and test cases. The latest version is called Enterprise Library 6; the previous full release, Enterprise Library 5, came out in April 2010.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/26/20130 comments
Visual Studio Tools for Git has "crossed a significant threshold of completeness and usability" with its latest release.
That’s according to Microsoft Technical Fellow Brian Harry, who announced the upgrade on his blog today. The key improvements, he wrote, are performance increases, better functioning for large code repositories and fewer merge and pull conflicts for developers working simultaneously on projects.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/26/20130 comments
The hugely popular JavaScript library jQuery just turned 2.0. And it's an especially significant release for .NET developers, as it jettisons some older Internet Explorer browsers and enhances support for writing Windows 8 applications.
The most important fact about jQuery 2.0 for Web developers is that IE 6, 7 and 8 are no longer supported. Dave Methvin, president of the jQuery Foundation, blogged that for sites that need to maintain compatibility with older IE browsers, the 1.x versions of jQuery will do just that, including an upcoming 1.10 version (1.9.1 was the last version of jQuery officially released). The older browsers, through the 1.x branch, will be supported for "several more years," Methvin wrote.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/19/20130 comments
Facebook today released the Facebook SDK for .NET, to enable Windows-focused developers to integrate their applications with Facebook.
The SDK was announced on the Windows Phone Developer Blog. The open-source SDK is C#/XAML based, and can be found at the Outercurve Web site. Most developers will want to install the SDK using NuGet (this page recommends having the latest version of NuGet; some features of the SDK won't work with older versions.)
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/18/20130 comments
Agile is one thing, but this is ridiculous. Less than two weeks after Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 was released, Microsoft already has the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Update 3 ready to go. (Mary Jo Foley reported on the release first, as far as I can tell. )
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/17/20130 comments
The struggle continues. I was just reading an eWeek article about programming languages, and why some are less secure than others. This being eWeek, the article was aimed more at a general audience than a developer audience, so some allowances need to be made. But not allowances that are simply wrong, and by an alleged expert.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/12/20130 comments
Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 is out of beta and officially available. Among the biggest upgrades, according to a blog entry by corporate V.P./Developer Division S. Somasegar, are improvements to Agile planning, Windows Store development and line-of-business development.
Most of the Agile updates center around Team Foundation Server (TFS), Microsoft's chief collaborative tool. They include work item tags (more on that here), a Connect dialog box in Team Explorer to locate different team project connections and projects, and more customization of backlog items through the Kanban board.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/05/20130 comments
It appears that Microsoft's upcoming Build conference in San Francisco is sold out -- again. But this time for real. This follows on the heels of a "technical error" on the Build Web site yesterday that mistakenly told developers that registration had filled up in about three hours.
Last year, Build sold out in about an hour. Many developers were stunned, and there was more than a little unhappiness that every slot was taken before some folks got back from lunch. Part of the reason is that the 2012 event was held at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash. This year, the event's being held at San Francisco's Moscone Center, a much, much larger venue.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/04/20130 comments
Microsoft released an important new Kinect for Windows SDK today. Bob Heddle, director of Kinect for Windows, called it "our most significant update to the SDK since we released the first version a little over a year ago" in a blog posting.
SDK 1.7 is coming out at the same time as a developer toolkit and Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) for adding Kinect functionality to applications.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/18/20130 comments