Microsoft has a long and storied history of creating mind-altering corporate
videos. It runs the gamut, from the slick, minimalist tribute that is the Volkswagen-inspired
"Da
Da Da" spot
, to the hopped-on-meth circus show that is Steve Ballmer's
epic
"Developers!
Developers! Developers!"
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/17/20084 comments
Virtualization has gained a lot of traction in the developer community, particularly
in the areas of QA and test. And it's become so ubiquitous in the general IT
space that our parent company, Redmond Media Group, recently launched a new
publication called
Virtualization Review
to provide dedicated coverage
of virtualization issues. You can find the Web site
here
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/17/20080 comments
Back in June of last year, we
featured
Jeff Atwood
in the pages of
Redmond Developer News
, profiling him
and his popular
Coding Horror developer
blog
in the Cool Developer Tricks section of
RDN
.
At the time, Jeff had expressed a concern that some of the big-name dev bloggers
he looked up to were busy running their own software companies and had a lot
more going on than he did. Now it seems that Jeff is onto a few small things
of his own. Since our interview, Jeff has moved on from his position as a senior
technical evangelist at Vertigo Software to devote more of his time to blogging
and pursuing an open source project of his own, called Stackoverflow.com.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/15/200810 comments
It's the kind of story that should rightly give anyone the chills. Yesterday
at the
RSA Conference
in San Francisco,
penetration testing expert Ira Winkler told the audience that the networks of
power companies are vulnerable to attack.
He should know. Winkler, you see, was able to hack into one such network in
less than a day.
Winkler and his team, working at the company's behest, were quickly able to
gain access to several employees' systems -- by way of a simple phishing attack.
From there, they could access the network controlling the power station's monitoring
and distribution operations. And from there, a lot of things -- mostly bad --
can happen. You can read a Network World article about Winkler's presentation here.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/10/20080 comments
Microsoft is, of course, a leader in the arena of IT and software development.
And yet, I often feel that Microsoft runs the business the way I drive in rush-hour
traffic -- an abrupt, panic-filled drama punctuated by angry shouting and the
occasional triple-lane change. Still, the company almost always seems to get
where it's going.
In the mid-'90s, Microsoft reworked its entire MSN strategy and launched Internet
Explorer in response to the rise of the World Wide Web and Netscape. Just six
weeks ago, Redmond suddenly announced a strategic
interoperability pledge in response to competitive and regulatory pressure.
And now today, at the RSA
Conference keynote in San Francisco, Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy
Officer Craig Mundie talked about what the company calls its "End to End
Trust vision."
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/08/20083 comments
Maybe it's because I'm a middle child in an angry, Irish family, but I've always
played the role of diplomat. Whether it's soothing tempers around the dinner
table or hoping to find common ground in a heated political discussion, I'm
not one to admire intransigence.
So imagine my dilemma covering the ongoing push to make Office Open XML (OOXML)
an ISO standard. After talking to some of the brightest minds in the industry,
I've come to an unsatisfying conclusion: Smart people can, and often must, disagree.
And sometimes, they must disagree violently.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/03/20084 comments
Yesterday, we were all expecting to hear the final results of the vote to make
Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML) an industry standard under the International
Organization for Standardization (ISO). That announcement has been put off until
tomorrow, but
rumors
persist
that Microsoft may have narrowly won the support it needed to gain
approval.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/01/20080 comments
I've spent the last couple of days in San Francisco at
VSLive!
,
which offers Visual Studio developers a chance to glimpse Microsoft dev tool
roadmaps, hone technical skills, and explore important new tooling like Language
Integrated Query (LINQ) and the latest version of Visual Studio Team System
(VSTS). Along the way, attendees also get a chance to voice their opinions about
the tools they use every day.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/01/20080 comments
If Google has taught the world one thing, it's this: Search is good.
So I stood up and took note last month when Krugle
introduced the second version of its Krugle Enterprise Appliance, an enterprise
search network device that lets developers and managers track down specific
code assets across repositories and over the Internet. The appliance can search
enterprise code indexed behind the firewall, and also provides access to Krugle's
public index of more than 2.6 billion lines of open source code.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/27/20080 comments
When the Mozilla development team started work on Firefox 3 back in 2005, one
of the key issues facing the group was the issue of memory management. Shifting
usage patterns and increasingly demanding Web environments had exposed issues
like insidious memory leaks and application processes that failed to let go
of allocated memory. The result: Degrading performance and concerns about stability.
About a month ago, Mozilla developer Stuart Parmenter wrote an informative
account of how his team went about attacking the memory allocation and handling
problem. You can read it on his
blog here.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/20/20080 comments
Even as Mozilla fixes and
tweaks
its own code
, the open source purveyor is motivating developers to do the
same with their add-ons and extensions. Mozilla just announced the Extend Firefox
3 contest, which rewards developer efforts for creating outstanding add-ons
for the forthcoming release of Firefox.
The contest will run through July 4 and emphasizes outstanding UI, innovative
approaches and the use of open standards. A new category will recognize the
best updated versions of existing add-ons.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/20/20080 comments