Michael Desmond, founding editor of Redmond Developer News and Desmond
File blogger, is on vacation. Filling in for him today is Kathleen Richards,
senior editor of RDN. You can reach her at [email protected].
Big interop news out of Redmond this morning. As reported by my RDN
colleague Jeffrey Schwartz, Microsoft is making a push to be more open:
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Posted on 02/21/20080 comments
Michael Desmond, founding editor of Redmond Developer News and Desmond
File blogger, is on vacation. Filling in for him today is Kathleen Richards,
senior editor of RDN. You can reach her at [email protected].
Microsoft isn't the only company that's trying to get
students on board early. In early February, Borland's developer tools subsidiary
CodeGear announced a sizable
licensing agreement for the Eastern bloc. The company joins Corel and other
as yet unannounced vendors in a deal with the Russian Federal Agency of Education
to provide technology and other resources to teach programming in primary and
secondary schools.
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Posted on 02/21/20081 comments
In the course of just over a week starting on Jan. 30, a total of five undersea
data cables linking Europe, Africa and the Middle East were
damaged
or disrupted
. The first two cables to be lost link Europe with Egypt and
terminate near the Port of Alexandria.
Early speculation placed the blame on ship anchors that might have dragged
across the sea floor during heavy weather. But the subsequent loss of cables
in the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean has produced a chilling numbers game.
Someone, it seems, may be trying to sabotage the global network.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 02/19/20085 comments
A couple of weeks ago, blogger (and sometime
RDN
contributor) Mary Jo
Foley at
All About Microsoft
wrote about a
new
programming language
in the works from Redmond codenamed "D."
D is a "textual modeling language" that's integral to Microsoft's
ambitious Oslo initiative, which RDN has previously
covered. Oslo aims to enable Microsoft's dynamic IT strategy by offering
tools and resources to help enterprises better plan, model, develop and deploy
applications. Oslo is extremely wide-ranging, with aspects of the program driving
new versions of Visual Studio, BizTalk Server and the .NET Framework. It'll
be 2009 before Oslo actually arrives.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 02/14/20080 comments
Keep an eye on SourceForge tomorrow for the launch of a Microsoft-led open
source software project, which the company hopes will provide powerful conversion
tools for existing MS Office binary files. The new project should help Microsoft
extend the perceived value of its XML file formats for shops that currently
have a large investment in its binary formats.
You can read more about Microsoft's thought process at Brian Jones' blog post,
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 02/14/20080 comments
A few weeks back, I wrote about a Burton Group study that
took
a rather positive view
of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) file format
specification, while also casting doubt on the open source OpenDocument Format
(ODF). I also published a
Q&A
with Sun Microsystems Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps, offering a bit
of a rebuttal to the Burton Group report.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 02/12/20080 comments
When Microsoft launched its first Microsoft Office System Developers Conference
yesterday, it reminded me of old times. In an era of Web services, AJAX-based
rich Internet mashups and portable implementations of the .NET Framework, it's
nice to know that Microsoft can still trundle out an old-fashioned, monolithic
application platform without a hint of shame or irony.
As RDN contributing editor John Waters reports,
Microsoft is touting Office as a platform for development, tying the ubiquitous
productivity suite into everything from back-end ERP software to public-facing
Web services. To that end, Redmond is promoting Office Business Applications
(OBA) as a distinct class of Office-aligned applications for businesses.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 02/12/20080 comments
When Microsoft made a $44.6 billion tender to
purchase
online giant Yahoo
, it did more than make a lot of waves in the IT and financial
arenas. It also shook the confidence of a lot of developers.
You need look no further than this
Mini-Microsoft blog post, which concludes that while developers at Microsoft
expect little to happen any time soon, whatever eventually does happen will
probably be bad. This snip pretty much sums it up:
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 02/07/20080 comments
It was just over a year ago -- Jan. 28, 2007, to be exact -- that Microsoft
research fellow and Turing Award-winner Jim Gray
went
missing
off the coast of California, during what was supposed to be a solo
day trip on his 40-foot sailboat
Tenacious
. Despite an extensive search
of the waters off the San Francisco bay, Jim Gray and his boat were never found.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 02/05/20081 comments
I don't have to tell anyone about the growing problem of complexity that faces
development and IT managers. Enterprises find themselves managing increasing
numbers of applications, tied to a diverse array of internal and external data
sources, services and people. The end result: The information often is out there,
but the applications -- and the people who rely on them -- can't get at it.
Enter the concept of Information as a Service (IaaS). Like Software as a Service
(SaaS) before it, IaaS aims to break chokepoints that have developed as the
scope, scale and interconnectedness of enterprise systems have grown. Where
SaaS enables the flexible delivery of trusted applications to endpoints over
public and private networks, IaaS enables a more dynamic, flexible and robust
means for information access across evolving and growing infrastructures.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 01/31/20080 comments
Simon Phipps is chief open source officer for Sun Microsystems Inc. As such,
he stands at the center of a heated debate over standards-based XML file formats
like the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML).
With OOXML approaching a crucial late-February review by the International Organization
for Standardization (ISO), Phipps has been busy. Really busy.
We talked with Simon and got his thoughts on the OOXML tussle as well Sun's
efforts in the open source community.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 01/29/20080 comments