I think my employer first started urging me to join Twitter about two years ago. Ever the company man, I did what any forward-thinking technology editor keen to hold onto his job would do. I ignored it.
But if rust never sleeps, Twitter never rests. And it became apparent, even to me, that tweets have emerged as an important stream of up-to-the-minute information and context in the developer space. So with the grudging reluctance of a child told to go clean his bedroom, I signed up. And in the scant few weeks since I jumped on board, I've found Twitter to be enormously useful for staying in touch with our far-flung contributors and for catching the occasional shiny glint coming out of Redmond.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/25/20111 comments
On April 6, Novell shipped the production version of the Mono for Android development tool, which enables.NET developers to build applications for Android-based devices. Three weeks later, Attachmate finalized its $2.2 billion purchase of Novell. A week after that, on May 3, Mono lead Miguel de Icaza broke the news via Twitter that Attachmate was shuttering the Mono effort and had laid off the entire team.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/24/20114 comments
My flight out of soggy Burlington, Vermont won't leave for another 16 hours, but I had a chance to speak this morning with Sean McBreen, Microsoft Senior Director of Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management, about this morning's keynote and the expanding horizons of ALM under Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server. He echoed many of the points made by Microsoft Corporate VP of Visual Studio, Jason Zander, during his keynote. And I left the call with a four-word summary of Microsoft's ALM strategy rattling around in my mind:
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/16/20110 comments
The Tech-Ed Keynote will kick off any minute now. I'll be in Atlanta tomorrow, but for the moment my cohort,
Redmond Magazine
Executive Editor Lee Pender, is at the conference to cover the proceedings. You can visit the
Pender's Blog
, over at sister magazine
Redmond Channel Partner
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/16/20110 comments
Gil Fink is a senior architect for the Sela Group and a Microsoft MVP focusing on data platforms. In the May issue of Visual Studio Magazine, Gil wrote a feature exploring the new Code First features in Entity Framework 4.1 ("Not Just a Designer: Code First in Entity Framework"). We followed up with Gil on his thoughts about EF 4.1 and the impact of Code First for .NET developers.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/12/20110 comments
Microsoft on Tuesday
confirmed
that Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Platform, was moving to assume control of the new Azure Application Platform group. The transfer has big implications for the .NET developer community, which has benefited from a host of advances during Guthrie's tenure in the Developer Division at Microsoft.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/05/20115 comments
So Mary Jo Foley was right. Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Platform,
is gone
. He'll be heading up the newly created Azure Application Platform team at Microsoft, reporting to Ted Kummert, senior vice president of the Business Platform Division.
Microsoft hasn't said much yet, but the memo that Mary Jo Foley obtained makes it clear that Guthrie will be asked to bring his developer relations mojo to an Azure platform looking for some spark.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/02/20117 comments
I suffered a rude surprise when I came across
this blog item
from All About Microsoft blogger (and Redmond magazine columnist) Mary Joe Foley. She says that Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Platform at Microsoft, may be moving to the Windows Azure team as part of a larger May 1 reorg in Redmond.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/27/20112 comments
Want to start a fight? Ask a bunch of .NET developers about their opinions on the relative merits of the Visual Basic and C# programming languages. If the activity in our comments section is any guide, the discussion can quickly shift from a high-minded analysis of lambda expressions and XML literals to a shouting match over who makes the most money.
Like so many great rivalries, the contretemps between VB and C# are borne out of proximity. Since 2002 the two languages have shared a common foundation in the .NET Framework, and for the past two years have drawn closer together thanks to Microsoft's co-evolution strategy. In the May issue, we look at Redmond's decision to abandon the effort to differentiate the two languages, and explore how a future of feature parity may impact developers' language choices down the road.
Also in May you'll find Gil Fink's exploration of the new Code First features in Entity Framework 4.1. As Microsoft's Scott Guthrie blogged last year, code-first development in EF "enables a pretty sweet development workflow" that lets developers create domain models without using a visual designer or .edmx file. Finally, Todd Anglin of Telerik offers insight into the opportunities (and challenges) around reusing Silverlight code across desktop and Windows Phone 7 platforms.
Visual Studio Magazine Tools Editor Peter Vogel is at it again this month. He writes a hands-on review of Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1, and also provides a data access deep dive with his Practical .NET column on speeding up data-related operations in .NET applications. On VB columnist Joe Kunk offers a detailed tour of the LightSwitch application development environment, and Mark Michaelis kicks off his new UI Code Expert column with advice on structuring complex Visual Studio solutions.
Roger Jennings is on board in May, writing a VS Insider column that takes aim at the debate over NoSQL databases for Web scale applications. Could SQL and NoSQL be a lot more complementary to each other than we all think? Finally, Andrew Brust implores Microsoft to young it up and be more public and vocal about things like its cutting edge research efforts.
Even as the May issue prepares to hit the street, we're looking for your input for June, July and beyond. What issues or topics would you like to see covered in the next issues of Visual Studio Magazine? Email me at [email protected], or leave a comment below.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/26/20110 comments
Today at VisualStudioMagazine.com we're debuting a new, monthly column dedicated to open source tooling and development in .NET. The Open Source .NET column, written by Ian Davis, delves into the fast evolving arena of open source development tools. Ian is the Master Code Ninja for software architecture and development consulting firm IntelliTechture and an expert on the .NET Framework. He's also a frequent industry presenter and co-organizer of the Spokane .NET User Group.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/20/20110 comments
Not to
lean on the topic of the Visual Basic .NET
programming language, but earlier this week I had a conversation with Navot Peled, president of code migration tools provider Gizmox. His company's Visual WebGUI tool enables developers to move existing, rich-client applications to the Web or cloud.
The company just recently announced it was partnering with Tata Consultancy Services in Israel to provide a joint solution for migrating Visual Basic 6 and other legacy applications to .NET. The timing is no coincidence. Microsoft apparently has no plans to include the VB6 runtime with Windows 8. And with extended support for VB6 long since retired (back in April 2008), the risk of continuing to maintain even stable VB6 code starts to go up.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/30/201113 comments